Spartan Weddings / Customs NOT To Include

This time, how about some foreign customs you DON’T want to include in your wedding?

Sparta was a Greek city-state, known for military lifestyles (Even today “spartan” means simple and bare.) and for constantly clashing with their neighbor, Athens. Spartan girls married around 18 or 20, several years after Athenian girls, but the advantages stop there. No gown and flowers for a Spartan girl. To prepare for the wedding night, the bride’s hair was cut like a man’s and she dressed in men’s clothing. How romantic!

The wedding would involve the husband overpowering his wife. Not literally of course, because marraiges were an affair of the city-state (at some points, the bride-to-be had to pass a physical fitness test before she could be assigned her husband!). The groom would “break in” to his wife’s home… avoiding  the “guards” her father posted to protect her. Sometimes the groom would sling her bride over his shoulder and take her home, other times he would just sneak into her house, perform his, er, husbandly duties, and call it a day.

Married life wasn’t much better. Married men still lived in the barracks most of the time, but met up with their wives occasionally for procreation.

Scottish Wedding Customs: Part 2, The Wedding

A Scottish wedding ceremony takes place in the local church The Scottish Reformation forbid the exchanging of wedding rings as inappropriate and Papist, but this custom eventually came back. Vows would be in either English or Gaelic. Gaelic vows are gaining popularity with Scottish-American couples today.

One lovely Scots tradition is the wearing of white heather. Purple heather grows all over Scotland, but white heather is more rare. Wearing a sprig of white heather (especially against a Scottish blue gown) looks beautiful and is supposed to ensure marital harmony. Giving a pot of white heather to the bride and groom, who keep it next to their door, does the same.

In 1929, the age of consent to marry without parental permission was raised to 16 in Scotland. Meanwhile, in England the consent of parents is required until the intended couple is over the age of 18. This resulted in young English couples eloping to Scotland if they were unable to get their parents’ permission! The first major town over the Scottish border is Gretna Green, so this became the site of many elopements, in history and in literature. Lydia and Wickham, in Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice, are thought to be eloping to Gretna Green in Scotland.

Gretna Green is now considered Scotland’s “wedding capital”, a trendy place to hold a wedding. Thousands of brides choose Gretna Green each year.

Depending on the bride’s financial situation, she would either have a “penny wedding”, where friends and neighbors brought potluck dishes, or a “free wedding”, given by the bride’s father. Either way, the reception would follow the ceremony with eating, drinking of healths, dancing and singing.

When the bride and groom finally made it to their new home, the groom would lift her over the threshhold, because if she stumbled, it would bring bad luck to their union.

The idea behind key west vacation packages is having a theme vacation rather than the usual dread routine annual vacation spot. It inspires you toshow creativity while you plan your vacation

Scottish Wedding Customs: Part 1, Engagement

Scottish weddings have many lovely traditions that a modern bride might incorporate into her own wedding today.

To begin with, the traditional Scottish bride would first have an engagement party, with all her family and all of her intended’s family.  At the réiteach or formal betrothal party, it was often said by the bride-to-be’s father :

“Ma tha ise deònach, tha mise ro-dheònach, agus mura bi sin mar sin, cha bhi seo mar seo” which means “If she is willing, I am very willing and if that weren’t so, then this wouldn’t be so” (from Margaret Fay Shaw in her book Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist)

After the betrothal, the banns would be called three Sundays in sucession. This means that the names of the intended couple andtheir intention to marry would be read in both the bride’s and the groom’s home parish. Kind of a three-week-long “If any one knows why this man and this woman should not be joined in marriage, speak now or forever hold his peace”.  The wedding would be on the Tuesday after the last reading. 

Although ”reading the banns” is no longer required, it’s commonly used as a synonym for engagement. For example, “We went on two dates, Mam, we’re hardly reading the banns,”

After the formal engagement,  it’s time for the bride to start working on her dress. No white for a Scots bride, though. Blue is popular, althought there is no fixed color. An old-fashioned Scottish bride would make or order a beautiful gown, but with an eye to wearing it again.

 And the families would begin preparing the food for the wedding day. Margaret Fay Shaw goes on to say: 

 The greatest chore for a wedding was the plucking and cooking of innumerable hens presented for the party by friends of the bride and bridegroom from all over the island. A delegation was formed just to deal with this part of the feast which consisted of cold chicken, roast mutton, scones and bannocks, fresh and salt butter, new cheese and many another special delicacy of the island, with the ever-present tea, and whisky and port wine for the toasts. (I’m getting hungry) Chickens were considered such an essential part of these feasts that when an epidemic killed a lot of hens on the island, Seonaidh Caimbeul, the local bard, made a song about it in which he refers to the grief of prospective brides at the impossibility of making proper wedding feasts without them.

 

Offbeat Brides

If you’re hoping for wedding photos that look like this, check out Offbeat Bride! It’s a blog-style site full of lovely wedding photos and good advice from creative couples. These clever brides have really made their celebration their own. It’s great to see that there’s something between the white-dress works and a quickie registry office job.

The site is supposed to accompany Ariel Meadow Stallings‘ book Offbeat Bride: Taffeta-Free Alternatives for Independent Brides, (does taffeta-free sound good or what?) but it’s a good read on it’s own.

Plus One? Or Not?

When planning your guest list, you may be wondering whether to invite your single friends alone or “plus one.” Obviously, your guests’ spouses are included, (yeah, even the annoying ones) and the same for fiances and long-term signifigant others.

But what about your single friends? Should they bring a date?

If you ask your single friends to bring a date, you’re encouraging all that flirting and meeting new people that make weddings fun. By adding a plus-one, you’re tipping the ratio between friends and great-aunts in your favor. But you could also put a single friend on the spot by asking him or her to come up with a date for your big day. And, you’re also inviting (and paying for) someone you and your intended may not even know.

Emily Post (of Emily Post’s Wedding Etiquette) says that “allowing single guests who aren’t attached to significant others to bring dates is a thoughtful gesture, but one that is certainly not required and often not realistic.”

Attention Brides!

Attention Brides! ValueMags has a free year’s subscription to Bridal Guide. All kinds of dresses and event information, and no need to give a credit card number. Don’t forget to use your spam address, unless you really want special offers arriving almost every day.

If comparing one white dress to another isn’t quite your thing (and you’d never sue over floral arrangements), consider either the Game Over wedding t-shirt or the I Got One! Bride shirt.

Bridezilla Sues Florist for $400,000

Brides-to-be often get a little fixated on the look of their weddings, and making their big day extra special, but this story puts those endless conversations about roses verses lilies into perspective.

 A New York couple sued a florist for $400,000 for using the wrong color flowers at their wedding — a mistake the newlyweds said caused them “extreme disappointment, distress and embarrassment.”

Elana and Toby Glatt had requested $465 centerpieces in “deep and dark colors of fuchsia, rust and green.”

Instead Posy Floral Design Studio, which charged almost $30,000, used cheaper flowers and the centerpieces appeared “predominantly pastel pink, almost white,” according to the lawsuit filed in New York State Court.

The result “had a significant impact on the look of the room and was entirely inconsistent with the vision the plaintiffs had bargained and paid for,” said the lawsuit, which accused the florist of fraud, breach of contract and negligent misrepresentation.

The florist’s owner, Stamos Arakas, said his photographs of the wedding show he provided exactly what the couple had wanted and he intends to counter sue for damages to his business reputation.

i’d be pretty mad if I planned for fuchsia and rust flower centerpieces, and then got pink and white. I think I’d always be a little annoyed looking at my wedding pictures, but suing for $400,000 is a bit excessive!

Trying to Trim the Guest List

During the first stages of planning our wedding, all those involved sat down and created a massive guest list. We came up with every person that might possibly be invited. Needless to say, this list was hundreds and hundreds of people long.

And then came the cuts.

Cutting people off a guest list is an agonizing process. Ideally we’d like to invite everyone, but of course we don’t have the money for that, so here’s how we started trimming:

1. We cut kids.
We wanted to be inclusive initially, but we’re also the last of our set of friends to marry and start a family, so a huge portion of our initial list consisted of toddlers. (A handful of kids will still be coming, but that’s it.)

2. We cut the “reciprocal wedding invitation” folks.
By this I mean we took off those we felt we had to send an invite to only because they had invited us to their wedding. We just don’t have the funding to be polite like that.

3. We cut co-workers.
We have too many family members and friends to accommodate as it is, so nearly all co-workers have to be sacrificed, unfortunately.

…And now we’re down to the tough choices. Which friends mean the most to us? Which do we want to be there, and which do we need to be there?

One of the criteria I’m using to decide is the Engagement Question. No, not the “will you marry me” bit — the “when did you tell this person you were engaged?” one. Did you tell them that day, the next day, the next week… or did you just figure they’d hear about your engagement through the grapevine? The answers to this question are really helpful when it comes to “ranking” one’s friends (as awful as that sounds).

If that doesn’t get us down to the number we’re aiming for, our last resort will be to eliminate some of the “guest” spots we’ve been reserving for single friends. Again, not the most polite thing to do, but I think most of our single friends would understand if we explained the situation to them. (Besides, they’ll all probably come as a big group anyway.)

I think we’ve still got about 20 more people to cut, so wish us luck…

Bride Sues Florist for More than $400,000

I just read an article over at MSNCB.com about a bride who decided to sue her florist.

Why?

Because the hydrangeas in her 22 centerpieces were rust-colored instead of pastel pink.

Elana Glatt (the bride) wants more than $400k from Posy Floral Design of Manhattan for both getting her color scheme wrong. (The flowers originally cost $27,435.)

The florist says he explained to Glatt that the color might not be exact, but I guess Glatt thought they were too inexact to let it slide.

What do you think about this predicament?

Personally, I have a hard time getting past the fact that the flowers for the centerpieces cost as much as they did. According to a CNN/Money survey conducted in 2005, the average cost of getting married is $26,327. That’s less than this bride spend on centerpiece flowers. Yikes.

Once I look beyond the money thing, though, I think that a contract is a contract, and a florist ought to be able to deliver flowers that are reasonably close to the desired color. In my mind, “rust” and “pink” are not close, so I can understand why this bride might be upset.

I do wish the article had included photos, though — both of the expected color and of the actual color. That would make it easier to tell if Glatt really has a case or if this is just some sort of residual bridezilla-ness…

My Bridal Show Experience (And Some Advice!)

I’m just starting to plan my wedding, and yesterday I attended my first two bridal shows.

The best part of each was definitely the free food. I sampled tuna, pork, scallops, potatoes, egg rolls, sushi, assorted finger foods, and 6 different types of cake. (Never go to one of these things on a full stomach!) And then there was the wine — I had a glass of so-so pinot grigio and fantastic pinot noir. Yum.

Besides the good food, though, there was the real reason for going: to learn about my local vendors and decide which (if any) would be a good fit to the party I’m trying to plan. I talked to photographers, videographers, florists, cake people, chefs, DJs, officiants, stationers, and even a chauffeur. From each of these people I received at least one (more like 3 or 4) pieces of written information, so that by the end of the day I had a bag brimming with booklets and brochures.

Overall it was a really fun, helpful experience. I do have some ideas about how I might do it differently next time, though, so I thought I’d share them here:

• Set up a separate e-mail account to give to wedding vendors and wedding websites. I gave my main email address to 50 people over the course of the day, and now I’ll probably be inundated with messages I don’t really need. In hindsight, I wish I had used an alternate address — both to keep all wedding stuff in one place, and to keep it from taking over my main account.
• Go with specific questions in mind. And have a pen. Ask your questions, and if you like the answers you hear, jot that down on the literature they give you to remind you later on. For instance, I’m considering a double wedding with my soon-to-be sister-in-law, so we went around asking various officiants how they would handle such a thing. Some people came up with great responses; others did not.
• Don’t eat too much! I know it’s hard not to try a little of everything, but remember that a lot of the food is rich, filling, and exotic — the type of stuff most people aren’t used to eating and that may or may not mix well in the stomach. Add to that the noise, the heat of a crowded room, the strong odor of other foods and flowers, and you have the perfect recipe for nausea.

If you’re planning a wedding and you hear about a bridal show in your area, I encourage you to attend. Even if you don’t find any vendors you like, there are a lot of fun things to see and cool people to talk to — and, best of all, many delicious foods to sample (in moderation, of course). Have fun!

Next Page »