What I put in my Philly-themed wedding guest gift bags
The bride was team Krimpets; the groom, team Kandy Kakes. Would their impending union survive such a deep divide?
When my fiancé and I checked into an L.A. hotel for my cousin’s wedding last year, we were given gift bags by the front desk attendant that the couple had filled with their favorite treats. I can’t recall what was in those bags now, but it was L.A. so it was probably a bunch of healthy crap. And a tiny bottle of booze.
As I saw the surprise on my fiancé’s face when he was handed a gift at someone else’s wedding, I realized this was the first time he’d encountered this fairly-new wedding custom.
In the ensuing moment, we spoke these two phrases simultaneously:
Me: “There is no way in hell we are doing this for our wedding.”
Him: “We totally have to do this for our wedding!”
Needless to say, my significant other is far more generous and patient than me. All I could see was the work and money it would take to put the bags together, and all he could see was how happy it would make our out-of-town guests, who traveled from near and far to be at our wedding last weekend.
Since his thoughtfulness is one of the reasons I fell for him, I relented. But there were conditions to my surrender: Our gift bags had to be Philly-themed and they would not include booze (we were already paying plenty for people to drink at the wedding).
If you’ve never encountered a hotel gift bag as a wedding guest before, they usually include a combination of three things: an itinerary of weekend events; a hangover kit, and late-night snacks. Sometimes, small gifts like pins or hats are included too.
One of my friends in Philly included COVID-19 testing kits in her bags last year because Philadelphians are brilliant and know how to subtly throw down a warning (”Oh, you got a cough? You better test yourself before come to my wedding, or COVID won’t be the last thing that hit you.”).
We decided to stick to the basics for our bags. First up, the mini hangover kit, which included a packet of aspirin, a vitamin C packet, hand wipes, a mint, and a bottle of wooder.
(An aside on wooder: When out-of-town friends and relatives gasped at my pronunciation of the word — which developed about five years after I moved to Philly, surprising me as much as anyone else — I felt it necessary to remind them that around here, I am speaking correctly and they are the fish out of wooder.)
Next up were the snacks, and it was important for me to include foods made in and around Philly. They had to be nonperishable items since we were bagging these in advance, so soft pretzels and roast pork sandwiches were ruled right out (sob!).
Instead, for our savory snack we opted to go with Herr’s. We bought variety packs, which include small bags of chips (original, sour cream, and barbecue), and popcorn, pretzels, or cheese curls. No, our guests did not get all the options, our wedding was not sponsored by Herr’s. They got one random bag and they liked it or they kept their mouths shut. One central Pennsylvania friend who dared to say they wished the bags were Middleswarth got to eat their chips with a full serving of bridal side-eye.
We knew we wanted to include Tastykakes in the gift bags, but we ran into two snags. First, my significant other and I did not agree on the type of Tastykakes. He is squarely team Peanut Butter Kandy Kakes and I am unequivocally team Butterscotch Krimpets.
While there were moments we wondered how our union would ever survive such a deep divide, in the end, we came to a compromise and bought an equal amount of both. Every guest got one or the other based on total randomness.
The other Tastykake snafu we ran into was that when you buy in bulk at the grocery store, the packages don’t come individually marked. Given we had guests who’d never heard of Tastykakes before, we needed these jawns labeled. So I put it out to Twitter and learned Costco sells Kandy Kakes and Krimpets — with labels — in bulk.
We hit up a relative with a Costco membership and secured the necessary sweets. That same relative gifted use a Costco membership for our wedding because people in the Philly area will show you something once and then you better learn how to do it yourself.
Next, we put fun-size bars of Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews in each bag, mainly because we often keep a bag of those in our house for ourselves. When trying to describe them to my dad I said, “I don’t know why they’re so good. I don’t even like peanuts that much but these things are amazing!” My partner articulated it a bit better: “They’re like Snickers without the nougat,” he said, (except Peanut Chews use molasses instead of caramel).
Finally, we topped the bags off with Ring Pops. While not made in the Philly region, they are manufactured in-state (Scranton) and we felt they were symbolic of the wedding. Plus, I’d bought two bags of 20 of those suckers to hand out for Halloween last year before the Phillies went to the World Series and gave me something better to do. Honestly, I just needed to get rid of them (shhh!).
As my now-husband predicted, all of our guests were quite impressed by the gift bags and we had fun explaining the local ties of the products within. It didn’t take long into our marriage for me to have to admit that this time, on this one thing, he was right.