The scourge of all wedding planners who try to organize an outdoor event is the unpredictable threat of bad weather. You’re counting on a sunny day, and all of a sudden the sky’s full of clouds. There’s a clap of thunder, and precious, lifelong memories become a soggy mess filled with sobbing bridesmaids, melted cakes, and voided tuxedo and gown rental agreements. You can’t really change Mother Nature’s mind once she decides a torrential downpour is in order, so relying on old superstitions is as good a plan as any. As luck would have it, there’s a custom in the southern United States that aims to keep the rain away for at least one day, but it requires a great sacrifice: burying perfectly decent bottles of hooch.
Bottles of bourbon, to be more specific. The steps of this reverse rain dance procedure are as follows: First, precisely one month before the event is to take place, the bride and groom must pay a visit to the location where they are to be wed. While there, they must bury a full, regular-sized bottle of bourbon (no cheaping out with airplane minis) upside down in the earth. Note: If you’re getting married at a posh country club, be sure not to accidentally dig up the eighteenth green. The brand and quality don’t seem to matter much. This indicates that Mother Nature is a degenerate lush, so perhaps you may be better off burying an economy-sized plastic jug to get the most bang for your buck.
Hopefully the day you bury the bottle is a sunny one, because the weather on that day is what you’re requesting for the wedding. So if it’s raining, snowing, or earthquaking, maybe you should just save your money or get drunk yourself. But if it somehow works and you’ve successfully warded off precipitation by way of your down-home black magic, you can dig up the booze and share it with everyone present (or just get blasted in a corner alone and depressed if you’re the father of the bride). While this tradition might be obscure even to some people who’ve lived in the South all their lives, there are wedding venues out there that suggest the custom be carried out by all their customers. Especially if the venue happens to sell bottles of bourbon, we’ll wager.
The Cake Pull
While burying the bourbon is a purely American tradition, there’s another Southern wedding custom that has its origins in Victorian England. Cake pulls (also called ribbon pulls) are small charms baked into the wedding cake with a ribbon left protruding. At the reception, all the single women tug at a ribbon, and the charm that’s attached is supposed to tell their future in some way. For instance, if the charm is a four-leaf clover, they’ll have good luck, and if it’s a heart, they’ll soon fall in love. Whether or not one of the charms is a cat that symbolizes the puller will become a lonely spinster living alone in a house full of felines is up to the person in charge of planning. Although it seems unnecessarily cruel.
The origin of the custom is a bit of a mystery. No one’s sure exactly which state it started in, but one of the whiskey meccas like Tennessee or Kentucky seem the most likely. Some think it all began as a marketing campaign, but the more romantic story is that it came over with the first immigrants from Scotland and Ireland. Whatever the case, it makes for a fine photo opportunity, just so long as you don’t mind a little mud getting on your finest Southern seersucker tuxedo. It can also be seen as a test of the groom’s mettle; if he’s incompetent enough with a shovel that he breaks the bottle, then how can he be trusted to get rid of the evidence when those pesky government revenuers come for the still?
Bottle Trees
Another bottle-related tradition from the American South is the creation of “bottle trees.” Like many old-timey customs, it was started to ward off evil forces. How you make one is pretty simple—just stick blue bottles (they’re usually blue) onto the branches of a tree so that it looks like Christmas at a drunkard’s house. The whistling noise made by the air passing over the empty tops was believed to be caused by spirits back when glass was a new thing in Northern Africa a couple thousand years ago. The belief that those spirits could be trapped in the bottles may have been brought over from Africa by slaves. They believed that once the morning sunlight hit the bottles, the spirits would be banished, and you’d have a home free of devilry along with a festive lawn ornament.
Judging by the weddings we’ve been to, the likelihood of just one bottle of bourbon getting passed around is usually pretty slim, so there are a few things to keep in mind when attending a Southern wedding before every one of your inhibitions gets thrown out the window. A number of food items could be on the menu that might prove disconcerting if you live north of the Mason–Dixon line. So prepare your gut for traditional delicacies like fried chicken gizzards, pickled pigs’ feet, something called livermush, or even something alligator- or opossum-related. We’re not saying you should expect these at every Southern wedding, but it’s certainly best to be prepared. Just ask the guy who never learned how to use a shovel properly, wound up breaking a bourbon bottle, and got chased all the way up to Massachusetts by an angry Alabama mob. We’re not sure if that ever actually happened, but you get the point.
