At our wedding this May, we asked our our guests to choose and customize their own LEGO minifigures to take home as wedding favors. On top of being very popular, it turned into a fun activity for our guests at the reception/party!
We bought over 100 LEGO minifigures from private sellers on Marktplaats (a Dutch version of eBay) and I also added some figures from my own collection that I could bear to part with.
We put them out on green LEGO base plates, and added some bowls with spare parts labeled “heads,” “hair and hats,” “legs,” and “accessories,” for easy customizing.
Since I'm a huge LEGO-nerd, I had built a LEGO City Hall with us and our guests in it, and photographed it to go with our save-the-dates which we sent out via email. We decided that this picture would work perfectly for the favors as well and turned it into thank-you-cards.
Lego chocolate favors
So you're having a Lego cake-topper. Or maybe your groom made himself Lego cuff-links. Regardless, you're thinking to yourself, “Self, what's the DIY perfect wedding... Read more
We got LEGO magnets, which are made to hold minifigures and can be used as fridge magnets.
We attached them to the cards, so that guests could pick up a card, place their minifigure on the magnet, and take it home.
It was really cool to see everyone play with LEGO at our wedding, especially when they excitedly came to show us their creations!
Cowboys and Indians? Hitting it out of the park lately with offensiveness.
And spacemen and builders and skeletons and lumberjacks and vikings – much more variety there for the guests than you may have seen initially.
I now want to have a bowl in the guest room with lego bodies and accessories so our guests can make up little figurines during their stay!
I saw them. I just wasn’t aware that if one offensive stereotype was outnumbered by neutral things, it didn’t matter anymore.
So, Vikings are neutral; cowboys and Indians, not? Offensive.
I’m aware that seems like I’m being facetious (I am a bit [or a lot]), but it’s quite a useful way to point out that all people will have different points of view.
I am genuinely sorry that you are having these feelings towards something that obviously brought these people a lot of joy. Both for your sake (because this has clearly upset you in some way) and for the original poster who, I’m sure, wouldn’t have thought this idea was offensive even if they sat and thought, “Is there any way that someone could be offended by this?” before including it in their wedding.
Also, this post ( http://offbeatwed.com/2011/03/egg-shells ) is at least somewhat relevant.
@Whoops Really? If you’re actually allowing yourself to be offended by Lego figures, perhaps this is the wrong blog for you…
Ah, we’re going the “Don’t ALLOW yourself to be offended by offensive stereotypes” “anti-PC” route.
What is it you find offensive? (Asking neutrally, not confrontationally.) Cowboys and Indians/indigenous peoples did exist. But if there is something specific about the designs being inaccurate, or Lego making profit off people who were exterminated through U.S. sponsored genocide, yes, I too would find that offensive.
I can’t speak for Whoops up there, but I made a mental wince at the stereotyped Native figures as well. It’s less (for me) about this individual woman’s use of them, and more about the larger culture of appropriating Native imagery without regard to individual tribes, or with any at all respect to accuracy. I’d also be uncomfortable with a Lego “mammy” figure, or any other such sort of thing.
Not trying to suck out the fun (as the whole Lego minifig idea is holy wow amazing!) but there is no reason not to be thoughtfully critical and engaged to the larger context of our decisions. We could pick at each other, or we could have a sincere conversation about what can be a difficult topic.
And, as a gentile woman marrying a Jewish man, I’m sensitized lately to culture and images and whatnot, so maybe I’m more reactive than the situation warrants. Thoughts?
Super-relevant post and conversation: http://offbeatwed.com/2011/11/cultural-appropriation
Jeez, way to suck the fun out what was supposed to be a lighthearted, fun post.
I am so sorry that you feel offended by the minifigures, that was not at all my intention! As a lego fan, I am so used to seeing minifigures in all shapes and sizes (we also had a punk rocker, geisha girl, flamenco dancer, knight, alien, etc.), that I hadn’t thought about how other people might reconstruct it as a political statement. I think that in the Netherlands we tend to associate these types of costumes with fiction, cartoons and old-fashioned Western movies anyway, and not directly think of real-life political discussions. The minifigures were just supposed to be a fun addition to the party, and luckily, my guests saw it the same way.
Best wedding favor ever, this person is my hero.
Brilliant party favour idea! I would find it interesting to see which of our friends made a Lego “mini-me” or pop culture icon and which ones made a wild fantasy character.
Soooooo stealing this idea. A multitude of pluses:
1) Fun for guests
2) People only need to take them if they want them
3) Who wouldn’t want to be left with leftover Lego figs if people decide that they don’t want them!?
4) Coooooool!
I’m doing the “if the guests don’t take their favors I HIT THE JACKPOT!” route too. While not legos, mine means more honeysticks for me! <3
I’m so glad to hear that you had a four year engagement that panned out successfully! My fiancee and I will have been engaged two years this October and we haven’t started wedding planning yet (financially combining isn’t in the cards for us right now). It’s looking like we’ll end up planning to have kids before we even get married (thanks govn’t for the sucky way you combine things!).
I know, procrastination is the best! After our engagement it turned out that neither of us wanted to do wedding planning for a hobby so unfortunately we didn’t spend those four years doing that, so we had lots to do in the six months before the wedding! When we finally did start planning we had a clearer vision of what we wanted to do, plus we could save up more money because we’re no longer students but have jobs now. Another advantage of procrastinating is that distant relatives always have a conversation topic at birthday parties… “So when’s the big day?!”
I read the first row of minifigs as being the Village People myself.
This is a really fun idea though especially if you’re having a lot of kids at the wedding.
Thanks! There were exactly 0 kids at our wedding, but yes!