custom, part one

As a Virgo, I appreciate a good checklist. When it comes to organizing and preparing an event, I love a color-coded spreadsheet even more, but there’s magic in any pithy roster that breaks a complex idea (like a multipronged, emotionally laden, and culturally significant event…for example, a wedding) down into actionable tasks. By collating all the little details that can clutter and collapse a mind, it brings the temperature down and keeps stressors at bay, permitting everyone involved a little more bandwidth for being present or maybe even enjoying and delighting in the event. As a ritualist whose personal and intellectual passions meet in designing, officiating, or just being invited to weddings, a checklist for planning a wedding is also an artifact, a primary source for understanding the context, subtext, and impact of an event. It’s so much more than a tool for efficiency — a checklist also reveals the assumptions and values that, whether obvious or implicit, shape it.

One such planning checklist includes 115 tasks spread out over the course of 12 months, but, similar to other resources available online and used by event planners for shaping American weddings, only 17 items (below) pertain directly to the thing at the center of it all: the wedding itself.

12 months before the ceremony…

• Discover your wedding style. Take our quiz.
• Choose your wedding party: maid of honor, bridesmaids, best man, groomsmen, flower girl and ring bearer.
• Start assembling a team of wedding pros: planner, photographer, videographer, caterer, florist, and musicians.
• Browse wedding dress and veil styles.

10–11 months…

• Choose bridal party attire and accessories.
• Reserve ceremony and reception venues.

6–7 months…

• Meet with officiant to discuss plans for the ceremony.
• Hire ceremony musicians.
• Purchase wedding bands.

3 months…

• Plan ceremony and reception seating.
• Finalize readers, readings, and music for the ceremony.

2 months…

• Begin writing vows.
• Review ceremony details with officiant.

1 months…

• Pick up wedding rings.
• Confirm final plans with wedding officiant.

1 week…

• Give readers their scripts.

Day before…

• Attend wedding rehearsal.

As an officiant, it’s hard to not take offense that, among the team of wedding pros to assemble, “officiant” doesn’t make the A-list, but I digress. It’s obvious that the content of these lists conforms to the logic and economy of event planning — some items require longer planning and advanced orders, some tasks can be done quickly. Setting aside the consideration of lead-times, how items are otherwise prioritized tells us something about the values and assumptions underlying the event — values and assumptions that are rarely excavated and examined in the light of day (or, more specifically, in light of the identities, experiences, and values of the people actually getting married).

For example (besides the blatant derogation of officiants #pityparty), in a 12 month plan, “Begin writing vows” happens two months ahead of the ceremony. Here’s the thing: the vows, the public declaration of commitment, constitute the only component in a wedding ceremony that distinguishes it from other events. Vows are what make a wedding a wedding. Shouldn’t the vows be the starting point? Shouldn’t a couple start planning their event by considering their particular relationship, their particular commitment, their particular values? Shouldn’t the rest of the ceremony and festivities flow from this starting point? Shouldn’t officiants and event planners be more attentive to matching a couple’s life and the resources available?

I realize that in this, my typical rant against the Wedding Industrial Complex (WIC), I’m an ant screaming at a juggernaut, but I take people’s identities, experiences, and values seriously, not just as quirks to plug into a sterile template. I also believe that through rituals people can impact their broader culture. The choices that couples make for a wedding can perpetuate old practices (and the values that come with them), but they can also innovate with form, function, and symbolism. They can reinterpret and reconstruct traditional practices to align them with their experiences. That has an impact not only on the couple at the center of the event; it impacts the perceptions of everyone present — witnesses, family members, friends, caterers, photographers, even nosy passers-by peeking into an event space — about what a wedding could be.

The WIC doesn’t have to recycle familiar practices, but it does. While individual vendors and planners might profess and even earnestly strive to deliver unique experiences, they’re bound by the resources of an industry that is more concerned with profiting from dependable crowd-pleasers than it is about actively reflecting the lived experiences of people getting married. Thanks, capitalism. Of course, “the industry” isn’t a person and capitalism isn’t an autonomous being, so blaming them can only effect so much change. Instead, any change in the industry, in our collective perceptions of what constitutes a wedding, and in our shared cultural values depends on the choices individuals make.

Given more information about the origins and evolution of particular practices, I think (ok, I would hope) more people would feel dissuaded from perpetuating them, or at least they’d be more critically creative about aligning traditional practices, contemporary expectations, and personal experiences.

For example, as Stephanie Coontz summarizes in her fascinating Marriage, a History, many of the components we associate with a typical American wedding find their origins in Queen Victoria’s ceremony at Chapel Royal in St. James’ Palace. ”The one family occasion that became more public in the nineteenth century,” Coontz writes, “was the wedding, although it was limited to invited guests. When Queen Victoria broke with convention and walked down the aisle to musical accompaniment, wearing pure white instead of the traditional silver and white gown and colored cape, she created an overnight ‘tradition.’ Thousands of middle-class women imitated her example, turning their weddings into the most glamorous event of their lives, an elaborate celebration of their entry to respectable domesticity.”

Victoria’s wedding has been the model for American weddings ever since, but as my mother said, “Don’t you people know we had a revolution?” Her march down a long aisle was, quite literally, a queen’s entrance. Despite the attempts of some families to achieve such status (the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Kardashians…), Americans don’t have a royal family. When middle-class women imitated her wedding, they became “queen for a day” on their path toward — what was Coontz’s phrase? — “respectable domesticity,” the feminine ideal reflected in Victoria’s wedding. Is this the goal of women today? #somuchforfeminism.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many places that couples can go to discern whether this or that practice or custom resonates with their lives, but George Monger’s Wedding Customs of the World collates practices encyclopedically and considers their historical origins, development, and contemporary uses. Monger’s project is noble, but, as much as it strives to be global and pluralistic, more details are poured into European and North American (US & Canada) practices than into entries about in indigenous and non-European practices. Still, Monger is careful not to editorialize and mostly avoids imposing assumptions or offering misleading characterizations.

A few things from Monger’s encyclopedia really jumped out at me…for various reasons. In the next few weeks, I’ll reflect on some of the components that Monger highlights, not only with the lens of a postmodern ritualist but also in dialogue with Coontz’s Marriage, a History. If you read along with me, consider these questions:

• What does this tell us about its original cultural and social context?
• What assumptions does this practice reflect or reveal about gender, class, religion, or any other aspect of identity?
• How does this practice hold up today?

Announcements

“Speak now, or forever hold your peace.”

You’ve heard the line, right? It’s a useful device for TV shows and movies to escalate tension, reminding viewers of the possibility that a former lover or someone with shocking information might pop up and spoil the whole day. Its origins, though, are much more complicated. In medieval Europe, the Church required “the reading of the banns,” or the announcement of an upcoming wedding as part of Sunday mass, for three weeks before the ceremony. This was to ensure that news about the wedding would spread through the parish, the town, and the region, and to give anyone with crucial information time to travel and stop the nuptials. What kind of information, you wonder? Well, what if the bride and groom are related, but don’t know it? What if one of them is an impostor, in hiding for some egregious crime in a neighboring region? Most importantly, in a region in which polygamy is brutally disdained, what if one of them is already married?

Until the Modern era, weddings (the formal ceremonies witnessed by an official representative of the state or the Church) weren’t a requirement for getting married. Many folx throughout Europe practiced what we today call “common law marriage,” which made it difficult to track recognized unions and prevent bigamy. It also made it difficult to keep people in those marriages in those marriages. A man might’ve abandoned a wife, family, and farm for greener, um, pastures, or a woman might’ve been already promised by her kin to another man. Announcements and the reading of banns formalized this extreme social paranoia, the original background check.

Today’s announcements, from Facebook posts to features in the New York Times wedding section, are rooted in this practice, but they’ve also been filtered through particular cultural lenses. We might be familiar with printed invitations with pre-addressed and -stamped response card (or, more recently, a link or QR code for RSVPs), but how a wedding is announced and how guests are invited differs widely and highlights other cultural practices. In Romania, the groom’s friends walk through town and deliver verbal invitations. In Czechia and Iran, the invitation is accompanied with cookies or sweets; in Denmark, the groom delivered the invitation and had a drink at each house. I don’t know about you, but that history makes my husband’s and my clever announcement on social media look pretty dull.

Community involvement
The history of weddings around the world demonstrates that the ceremonies, and marriages themselves, have not been a matter of two people making a choice. Ubiquitously, a wedding is a social, communal affair. The time and place of weddings typically aligned with local seasonal and agricultural cycles. Weddings were often timed when select foods and wines were available and when a whole-community celebration would be less disruptive.

Because weddings were fundamentally public events, community members — not just close family and friends — were directly involved in shaping the couple’s transition into marriage. In many cultures, the path to the wedding itself is blocked, and access has to be ransomed. In Poland, the couple offered vodka as a toll; in Thailand, the groom paid at various intervals to remove gold chains blocking his path. In New England, neighbors would lay fallen or felled trees to block the path to church. In Germany, children blocked the path and demanded payment for the couple to pass.

Even the marriage bed was a social experience. You might’ve seen wedding party members or other friends deck out the car (“Just Married!”) or decorate the honeymoon suite — flower petals strewn on the bed, champagne chilling in a bucket, maybe cute messages left for them to find. These practices, too, are rooted less in playful teasing and more in demonstrating the community’s role in (and power over) a relationship. Priests would bless the bed with the couple in it, praying for fecundity and happiness, and for aristocratic and royal marriages, high ranking folx would surround the bed to witness the marriage’s consummation. That’s right: they’d watch. In some corners, local rulers or lords might exact their first right to the bride to hammer home their authority, but reports of this seem to be, if rooted in reality, widely exaggerated.

It wasn’t very different for commoners. In England, the wedding party would surround the marriage bed and play “tossing the stocking.” Whomever the balled up bride’s stocking hit would be the next to marry. This practice finds its way into modern receptions and the customs of “tossing the bouquet” (quite literally, the bride throwing away her ‘flower’ — seriously, the symbolism isn’t subtle) or the removal by the groom of his bride’s garter belt (quite literally, undressing his new wife for all to see).