No wedding day is complete without a few fun surprises. Usually, however, those come in the form of unique vows written by the bride and groom, or maybe a funny entrance dance into the reception that makes everyone laugh. Rarely do wedding day surprises get as delightfully wacky as the one Mendl Weinstock planned for his sister Riva, when he brought a live llama to her wedding — dressed in a tuxedo, no less!
Mendl just recently shared the image on Reddit, where it quickly earned over 150,000 upvotes.
But the gag wasn't actually so out-of-the-blue.
It all started five years ago, when he and his sister Riva were driving from Ohio to Indiana with a bunch of her teenage friends. It didn't take long for their chatter to get on his nerves, he recently told CNN.
"She was talking about her wedding, planning it, making plans almost as if it was going to happen the next day even though she wasn't dating anybody at the time," said Mendl, who is now 21.
The incessant wedding talk made Mendl blurt out a declaration that he never forgot.
"I said, 'If you make me come to this wedding, I'm going to bring a llama with me,'" Mendl recalled to CNN. "It was just the first thing that popped into my head."
And yet, it went on to live in infamy …
Weinstock said his sister was annoyed but ultimately threw her hands up and relented, thinking it was all a big joke.
"I give up," Riva told him at the time. "The llama is invited to the wedding."
It turns out, Mendl never forgot his sister's promise. Five years later, he was finally able to deliver on his proclamation.
Riva became engaged in October, and shortly after telling her little brother the big news, he apparently fired off a text to remind her of their little "agreement" five years earlier.
According to his text, the llama rental was already confirmed.
Riva likely still thought her brother was kidding -- but it turns out, he was serious. DEAD serious.
When he showed up to her wedding March 1 in Beachwood, Ohio — and had a real llama with him — he says Riva was definitely annoyed, but she got over it quickly. After that, she was "more impressed that I managed to keep my promise from 5 years ago," he shared.
"When my brother puts his mind to something, he gets it done," Riva told CNN. "So at some point I had to accept it and decide that it was easier to get in on the joke than to fight it."
Mendl had apparently contacted a farm in Youngstown, Ohio, that breeds llamas, and rented one for the day for a cool $400.
Of course, the cherry on top was the llama's hilarious formal attire: a custom-made tuxedo, hand-sewn by Mendl's coworker.
Needless to say, the wedding guests got a kick out of the whole thing.
There was just one slight drawback -- unfortunately, the llama wasn't allowed inside the wedding venue (for obvious reasons).
But they didn't seem to mind.
Mendl says the guests "couldn’t get enough of it," and frequently ducked outside to catch a glimpse of the llama — who was named Shocky, for those who want to know — and take photos with her.
Although no live llama was inside the venue, a friend made sure that the joke continued there, putting two inflatable llamas at the bride and groom's table, CNN noted.
"My sister and I have a long history of playing jokes on each other, but nothing on this scale in the past," Mendl admits.
He says that as soon as he made the promise five years ago, he knew he had to keep it — and clearly, Mendl is a man of his word.
Now that it's gone viral, he's amazed at how many people are finding it hilarious too.
"This story has blown up more than I ever could have possibly imagined," he tells CafeMom. "When we hit 100k upvotes on Reddit, I thought that was as big as it was going to get, but it just keeps growing."
(And something tells us, it's not stopping any time soon.)
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