Kicking things off right.

Eric is up in Ann Arbor today, playing D&D with a group of friends he's been playing D&D with for years. So I came home and made harira, except with Great Northern beans instead of chickpeas because we don't have any, and called my mom. Mom was packing for her first move in twenty-one years and all she wanted to talk about was the wedding. She conceded it was very reasonable of us to drop the wedding planning until the house was in order, then wanted to know: what sort of food were we serving? Who were my bridesmaids? What colors had we picked? Had I selected bridesmaid dresses yet? (Michelle wanted to know this too. Apparently it's one of the first decisions a bride has to make. Or maybe it's just the decision the wedding party wants to know about.) I asked her about flowers and she said, "Does Eric wear a suit to work?"

I said no, he wears slacks and a tie, and she said, "Oh. Because in Korean tradition the bride's parents give the groom a suit. Would he ever need to wear a suit?"

I said of course, he could definitely use a suit, and she asked me about sizes because Nordstrom is having their Anniversary Sale (the good one; the other is the Half-Yearly Sale, and it's not as good) soon and she wants to be able to get something good if she sees it. Then she said, "Have you made his mother a quilt?"

I said yes, actually, for Christmas, and she said, "What kind? Because we give the groom's parents a blanket. So I was thinking you could make a quilt." I said that the quilt was a small Christmas lap quilt, and I could certainly make her another, bigger, better one; and she said she could also just buy a mink (note: fake, I think it's actually nylon, but soft and snuggly and available only in Oriental stores for some reason) blanket for her, but maybe it would be nice if I made it, and I said that would be fine, I have almost a year, and she said that was true, and we'd think about it.

She also said that traditionally, the grooms' parents give the bride lots of clothes, but obviously she didn't expect them to do that. "But I'm doing my part," she said. I'm going to have to ask her more about Korean weddings. It hadn't occurred to me to ask her about them, because from what my cousin Unhae said, and from the videos we watched of her wedding and her sister's, I figured they were Westernized; but maybe that's not so, or maybe Mom's thinking about weddings in her own time. Either way, I would very much like to be able to include some traditional Korean aspects in the wedding.