Maid of Honor Stuck With 100 Goldfish After Couple Uses Them as Wedding Décor
Picking up the… fishes. A maid of honor’s nightmarish ordeal has gone viral after she posted anonymously about it to Reddit earlier this month. In short: a clueless bride, 100 live goldfish, and a logistical quandary.
The maid of honor explained that her friend’s wedding was largely easy to plan, given that the reception hall where it was held came pre-packaged with everything from invitations to catering to cake to tables/chairs, and even decorations. The only real personalization that the bride had to worry about was what to do about centerpieces.
“The venue offered a variety of glass containers the bride could fill with whatever she wanted,” the maid of honor wrote. “Tall cylindrical vases, decorative platters, bowls, globes. Which shape she chose would depend upon what the bride chose to display in it. Did she want flowers? Candles? Pebbles? No, she had a better idea.”
The maid of honor then dropped the doozy: the bride wanted to put a pair of living, swimming goldfish in glass globes on each of the 40 tables, eventually to be taken home by guests as a sort of wedding favor.
Sure that this was a bad idea with an even worse outcome, the maid of honor voiced her objections several times throughout the course of the wedding planning.
“What happens to the fish after the ceremony?” she asked the bride, to which the bride responded, “Oh, the guests can take them home! They’d be like wedding favors! Keepsakes!”
When the maid of honor pointed out that not everyone would want to “take home a new pet from a wedding,” the bride dismissed her concerns. “Well, not everyone has to take one. There’s only a pair for every table, not everyone could take one anyway.”
The bride even asked the maid of honor to be on the lookout for “floaters” throughout the evening, or goldfish that had expired from the time they were released into their nervous setting into the end of the night.
Even though she tried to keep an eye out during the reception, however, the maid of honor noted that a substantial number of the fish died during the evening. “Luckily,” she wrote, “the happy couple had spares in the back.” By the end of the night, however, none of the guests really took any of the fish home, meaning that the wedding hall hosts were unsure of what to do with the remaining fish.
The bride and groom rushed off to their honeymoon and didn’t bother to take responsibility.
“That night I strolled into a big-box pet store in my big floofy red satin floor length gown, heels clacking on the tiles, and purchased a big-ass rectangular tank, a filter, and some fish flakes,” the maid of honor wrote. “A few were dead by the time I got home, and then more the next morning. More again in the afternoon, and the evening, and the next morning. By the third day, we were down to five, and we lost one a day after that until there was only one left. And the last one? Five years. I named it Sun. It lingered far longer than my friendship with the bride, and far far longer than her marriage.”
Reactions to the outlandish story were appropriately sympathetic, with one user commenting, “I would’ve taken the dead ones and mailed them to her individually, sending each one on the day it died and including a number card.”
Added another: “Yep. Worked a wedding where they had live fish in the center pieces. Most died before the guests sat down. What’s more appetizing than dead fish in stagnant water at your dinner table??”
Secure your ideal wedding vision by starting with The Knot’s Style Quiz, here.
Related Articles
