Wallybee and I have been discussing wedding dates. Initial plans: a wedding in Melbourne and a wedding in China. Only it turns out that it was actually two weddings in China, because her family and other groupies are concentrated in two different cities (Shanghai and Hangzhou). Furthermore, my office closes down between Christmas and New Years, so that would be the easiest time to swan off to a foreign country to get hitched as I don't need to get extra time off. (I've used up a bit of leave lately.) Apparently a Chinese wedding is a lot easier to pull together than those advocated by the marital-industrial complex in the West. Even two Chinese weddings. Nonetheless, my reaction was roughly "Wait, what?"
But! Conversations with the Wallybee's unofficial-proxy-parental-unit-and-landlord (I bet there's a culture with a single word for that) has suggested an alternative. In this version, we eschew the Melbourne wedding entirely, and go with a celebratory dinner instead. All I need to do, then, is work out a way to get my family over to Shanghai. (March or April, I'm not going to try that at Christmas.)