Thai wedding : bride price 'sin sod'
The bride price in Thailand or สินสอด (in Thai), pronounced ‘sin sod’ consist of money and gold.
The groom is supposed to give a pre-arranged amount of money to the parents of the bride at the engagement ceremony, which often takes place on the day of the wedding.
During the ceremony the bride and the groom will handover the money to the bride’s parents and the family members all will bless the money by dropping seeds and flowers on top of the pile to make it fruitful. This will be combined with blessing them with a long, happy, healthy and wealthy life, as other wishes like children in the future and so on.
When the bride price was a large amount some parents will return the money or a part of it to the newlyweds later in the form of a wedding gift.
If you interpret the bride price as buying the bride, you are looking at it the wrong way. You have to see it like an opportunity for the groom to prove he can financially support his wife-to-be and her family. (It’s common in Thailand to support parents financially that is how the system works.)
The gold is for the bride. Mostly it will be in the form of jewelry. The groom will put the golden jewelry on his wife-to-be during the ceremony.
