Wedding Traditions in Your Family

In My Humble Opinion
1

avabeth’s thread over here has got me to thinking about the huge variation in wedding traditions among different cultures, religions, and even geographical regions. For some reason they facinate me. In that thread, I mentioned a couple we did at my wedding–The Grand March, and the Veil for Hanky (The Oczepiny Ceremony, for all you other Polacks) switch–so I won’t repeat them here. But we also did others too…

Roses for Mary–I’m Catholic, and during the actual wedding mass I placed a bunch of roses at the feet of the Virgin Mother statue at the side of the church. The idea was to pay homage to the “ideal bride”, and also to ask for blessings on any children that might come into the marriage.

Chicken Dance–I think this one is pretty across-the-board, but I’m unsure. I know I’ve never been to a wedding where they didn’t play it, and it always gets more dancers on the floor than any other song.

Sneaking Out–I don’t know if this has a fancy name, but in our family it’s a tradition for the newly married couple to try to sneak out of the reception. It’s done with a lot of deliberate showmanship, and it’s a game to see who can stop them with the most innocent suggestion for why they must stay. “Oh bella, come here a second, I need to introduce you to your cousin Craig”. This continues until the party ends, or everyone gets so drunk that no one notices you actually leaving.

So, what are your family’s traditions?

2

There’s a song that’s always performed by the MC, although I’ve never heard the exact same lyrics twice. It’s supposed to be funny. The MC hands the couple an item and then rhymes something with it, like “Now I give the brite a hat, let’s hope your husband doesn’t get fat! Now i’ll hand the groom a pickle, when it comes to the bedroom, the wife can’t be fickle!” Well, it’s not all like that, some of it is about having kids and being happy.

That’s something that happened at all the Polish (as in, in the actual country) weddings I’ve been to. I don’t know if it happens at Polish-American weddings.

There’s a Korean tradition that I’ve seen with my husband and his friends … I don’t know how common it is, but whenever one of them gets married, the rest gang up on him and take off his shoes. They make him sit down with his legs out and each friend takes a turn whipping the groom’s feet with a paddle or something similar (a chair leg, for example.) It actually seems to be pretty painful. One groom couldn’t walk for most of his honeymoon.

All in good fun, though, I guess.

3

Here’s an older thread I started. There are some pretty neat stories. There is also some inexplicable hostility to the king-of-all-polkas, the Chicken Dance. I love me some Chicken Dance.

4

“Kidnapping” the bride and the groom (separately) from the reception. It’s a really stupid tradition, and rude to the guests and family as well IMHO. The groomsmen steal the groom; the bridesmaids steal the bride. They go off to a few bars and come back to the reception later.

Don’t ask me.

In my own immediate family, the tradition is “sneer at usual traditions and do things your own way so that it’s meaningful and personal.”

5

we get married, then we have children. It’s a tradition.

6

In my neck of the woods it’s just the opposite…the groomsmen steal the bride, and the bridesmaids steal the groom. This usually takes place very late in the festivities, and after they go their seperate ways and have a drink, they usually meet up at a pre-determined location, the bride and groom are re-united and they leave together for the honeymoon.

I don’t know, either.

In my family there is a tradition that I’ve never heard of anywhere else. It started more than 30 years ago when my eldest brother got married. “Jim and Sally” are some distant relatives that are never able to attend any of the bridal showers or weddings themselves, but they are always more than generous when it comes time to bestow gifts on the newlyweds. No one has ever met “Jim and Sally”, nor are we too sure exactly where they hang in the family tree, but they always give an extremely large box crammed full of gifts. Among the things my husband and I received from them were: an orange area rug with a hole in it, a broken cheese slicer, several beer bottle caps, cool whip containers and butter tubs (with lids, and boxed by themselves as “tuppywear”) two lovely round hand crocheted sofa pillows in done in yellow, orange and green yarn, a pair of florescent fuscia satin boxer shorts for my husband when he’s “in the mood”, boxed with a mayo jar full of fireflies for mood lighting, and an extremely large onion and several cloves of garlic threaded onto a piece of baling twine and made into a necklace for me to signal that I’m not in the mood.

It gets more and more fun as the years go by to assemble the Jim and Sally gift, and it’s become one of the most looked forward to part of the entire event. I have 7 siblings, and now the neices and nephews are starting to marry off and start families of their own. Most of us did not have a public display type of gift opening, so it’s all kept quite private and among immediate family. Those of us that did open the gifts at the reception would usually return home and find that Jim and Sally dropped the gift off at the house while they were gone. It’s fun for us, but we would never presume that other people would find it quite as humerous as we do, so we try to keep it just among ourselves.

7

There are two traditions I can think of that were honored by just about every married couple in our families, that we dodged.

The Chicken Dance, and Divorce.

I’ve not yet read sugaree’s linked thread, but I will say there is no such thing as inexplicable hostility to that friggin’ song and dance.

The DJ at our wedding, by about halfway through the reception, had violated a couple of the terms and plans we’d laid out in advance with him. We wanted one particular song played during dinner, because the thing’s impossible to dance to (though it’s got a nice weddingy sentiment, and we both like it.)

So of course, he played it as our second or third dance number, and we had to fake an awkward half-slow dance to it. There was some Beatles/Paul McCartney tune (I can now no longer recall with confidence) that he did at every wedding, and everyone loved it. The bit called for the bride and groom to be surrounded on the dance floor by as many people as possible, while he invented lyrics to the thing, and dragged it out as long as possible, poking mild fun at the couple in the process.

We told him to get stuffed with it. Since we’re paying the tab here, we get the final say, and it sounds mean-spirited enough (especially with his invented lyrics) that we don’t want it at our wedding. Bugger off with it.

So of course, he did it. We were good enough sports to play along, to our guests’ amusment, but I started to dislike the jerk a bunch.

We had also specified no bloody Chicken Dance. It’s just inane, pointless, and, admittedly, harmless. But I we hate the song, hate the goofy dance that goes along with it, and would much rather our reception (which we paid for ourselves, start to finish) not so much resemble a ho-down.

After his other episodes of “forgetfullness” (his excuse for the above, plus a couple other things) I took him aside and clarified matters a bit.

The envleope, with his payment, in cash, was in my pocket. It was going on the honeymoon with me, unopened, if I heard a single note of the Chicken Dance, or any of the other “wild and crazy” songs he’d suggested that we’d already turned down in writing, on a signed contract before the wedding.

He could explain to his musclebound assistants why they weren’t getting paid that night, after all, after moving all that heavy equipment for him, if he strayed by a single note from the rest of the playlist we’d given him.

In all fairness, I only kind of disliked the Chicken Dance before our wedding. I loathe the f*cking thing now.
[sub]I understand he did play it, after we left. That was okay by the letter of the contract. But I seriously toyed with refusing to pay him at all, for about an hour or so. Then I decided I had better things to think about. I did almost lose my cool on the hotel desk clerk who told us the room with the hot-tub we’d booked a month or two in advance wasn’t available that night. She found us another one miraculously unoccupied, when she learned her manager was, in fact, still dancing at the reception we’d just left.[/sub]