PARTY ON

The Celebrations Before the Celebration

There is vast cultural (and magical) precedent for having many, many parties as part of your nuptials. If you and yours have the stamina, a wedding weekend can be preceded by a wedding season, or even an entire wedding year. And no, you don’t have to be the one in charge of planning all of these bashes. There’s folkloric authority for family, friends, and anyone who loves the couple to host. Here are a few auspicious options for partying all engagement long.

SAY IT WITH SHOWERS

According to one legend, the custom of showering the bride with gifts arose in Holland in the seventeenth century when a father refused to give his daughter a dowry because he disapproved of her fiancé, a poor young miller. Instead, the thoughtful villagers threw her a party and brought her gifts to set up her new home. A whole bunch of presents is enough to make you feel lucky, but a shower also comes with superstitions revolving around the centerpiece of this party: the bride opening her gifts. Some hosts refuse to let the bride use scissors or a knife at all, which can make unwrapping dozens of boxes a challenge. That’s because cutting symbolizes the end of a relationship in cultures from Italy to Argentina to the United States. However, as the bride does get into her packages at showers in the States, it’s said that the number of ribbons she tears represents the number of children she’ll have. The ribbons are collected by a bridesmaid or friend and crafted into a “bow-quet” the bride will carry during her rehearsal or a hat she wears for the rest of the shower.

Not into all that unwrapping? Back in the day, a Finnish bride would knock on guests’ doors and collect gifts in a pillowcase (see this page).

It’s said that whichever gift a bride opens first is the one she should use first to bring luck to her home. But if she unwraps a set of knives, she should “pay” the giver for it with a penny to prevent cutting off the friendship.

SO LONG, SINGLE LIFE

Ancient Spartans came up with the custom of getting all the guys together the night before the wedding to fête the groom and send him off to a fortunate future, which we now recognize as a bachelor party. Today, women have bachelorette equivalents, and some couples opt for co-ed parties. The Germans have a word for a co-ed bash—and that’s meant literally. Polterabend, or “noisy evening,” takes place the night before the wedding when guests bearing pottery meet the couple in front of the bride’s family’s home. Everyone smashes the ceramics, scaring away evil spirits. The engaged pair then cleans up the shards—a task meant to earn them a happy life together—and everyone parties on.

Things also get a little noisy in Scotland, where the bride’s friends dress her in an odd getup and parade her through town as they bang pots, attracting customers to buy kisses from her by throwing money into the vessels. The groom also sports a humiliating costume, but he heads to bars with his friends, who sometimes then strip him and drop him off in front of his home.

In England and the United States, bachelor parties are called “stag nights,” and in Australia, “buck nights,” which brings a little luck to the equation, as deer, in China, are a symbol of longevity and prosperity. In Ireland and elsewhere in the United Kingdom, bachelorette festivities are called “hen parties,” because they’re a gathering of chicks. The name also happens to fit in with the Korean use of a hen and rooster to represent the bride and groom and bring luck to a wedding table (see this page).

AUSPICIOUS ACTIONS

Aside from these two classic parties leading up to the main event, there are several other interactive things you can do to invite luck to your pre-wedding celebrations.

Bake Some Bread

The Thursday before a Bulgarian wedding, the bride, her mother, and other female friends and relatives knead pitka, or “butter bread”; the rising of the dough symbolizes the growth of a new family. The bread is baked and later served at the wedding, where the newlyweds tear the loaf in a wishbone-like contest to see who will have the upper hand in their marriage, before distributing it to their guests.

Drum It Out

Muslims may have one dholki or several in the week or two leading up to the wedding. The word means “drum” because one is played, as friends and relatives of the bride and groom sing, dance, and feast. Either the groom’s or the bride’s family (or both!) can throw a dholki.

Have a Good Cry

Among the Tujia community in parts of China, it’s considered lucky for the bride—then her female relatives—to sob leading up to the wedding. The theory is that if she’s sad ahead of time, she’ll be happy in her married life, but the practice also enables her to express her sorrow at leaving her family and vice versa. A month before the wedding, the bride will sit in the hall for an hour a day and perform the “Crying Wedding Song.” One week in, her mom joins her, then come her grandmother and any sisters, and it becomes a big old pity party.

Give Them a Hand

Several days prior to Sikh weddings, both families get together, each at their own home, for a maiya purification ceremony, which involves rubbing turmeric paste, called vatna, on the bride’s and groom’s hands, legs, feet, arms, and faces, and tying lucky red strings around their wrists. It gets messy and hilarious and, at the end, the mothers of the bride and groom each make three vatna handprints on the outside wall of their houses, to share their joy by indicating to passers-by that there is a wedding in the family.

Make Your Bed

In some countries, the couple’s loved ones oversee the making of their marital bed, to bless them with fertility and prosperity. Called Au Chuang, or “setting up the bed” in China, this ritual is held on an auspicious date three days to a week before the wedding, when a happily married woman with children makes up the bed in lucky red sheets and covers it with fruit and red envelopes holding monetary gifts in sums that end in the fortunate number 9. Then children jump on the bed to invite progeny.

In Greece, the sheets aren’t red but the idea is the same—only it’s unmarried women who race to make up the bed, and whomever fits the last pillow into a pillowcase is said to marry next. Friends and relatives cover the bed in gold coins and paper money (for wealth), rose petals (for love), rice (for fertility), and Jordan almonds (for a sweet life) before babies are placed on top and children jump on the bed in the gender order the couple request. In both countries, the bed remains untouched until the wedding.

Paint the Town

All over South Asia (among both Hindus and Muslims), in the Middle East, and among Swahili communities in Kenya and Sephardic Jews worldwide, brides are adorned with mehndi, henna designs painted on their hands and up their forearms. With their reddish color, these patterns invite luck and fertility, repel the evil eye (see this page), and add to the bride’s beauty. While the bride’s mehndi is the most ornate and extensive—the couple’s initials may be hidden in the intricate patterns for the groom to find later—her female relatives and friends also wear mehndi as a means of joining in the celebration, often having it applied by makeup artists at a ladies-only party. Sephardic Jewish henna parties are co-ed, and are considered the moment when the bride joins the groom’s family. They also include a presentation of seven baskets of gifts to the bride, including Jordan almonds (see this page), sheets, perfume, and jewelry.

THE LAST SUPPER

In the United States, it’s traditional for the groom’s family to host the rehearsal dinner, a night-before party for the families and attendants, and perhaps all out-of-town guests, right after the rehearsal where everyone practices their role in the wedding ceremony. But that’s not your only option! In Guyana, the couple’s families get together at a queh queh, a lavish celebratory meal and dance-off where relatives sing songs, make jokes at the lovebirds’ expense, offer matrimonial advice, and ask the pair to “show me your science.” In response, the couple perform a sexy dance that indicates they know what to do to create future generations.

In Ireland up through the early-twentieth century, the bride’s family served the groom a goose dinner the night before the wedding, or as soon as the couple’s engagement was confirmed. The bird was a prelude to the signing of complex documents called “The Bindings,” which stipulated how the couple would live, right down to how often they would take their parents and in-laws to Sunday mass. After those papers were signed, it was believed that the wedding was as good as done, which led to the expression, “his goose is cooked.” Today the ritual, called Aitin’ the Gander, is just an excuse for a nice meal.

Music may be the food of love, according to Shakespeare, and it’s definitely the inspiration for Indian couples’ rehearsal dinners. The night before the wedding, guests attend the sangeet (the Sanskrit word for music), a party where the bride's and groom’s friends and family members dance, sing, and perform skits to entertain the couple. Even if you haven’t brushed up on your Bollywood moves, a dance party/sing-a-long makes a raucous rehearsal dinner alternative that encourages mingling between families and old and new friends.

PRE-VOW PRACTICES

Some events are so linked to the wedding they take place immediately before the ceremony begins. A long-held, cross-cultural belief is that it’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride—or her dress—before the wedding. This may have stemmed from arranged marriages, and the fear that once the groom saw his intended, he would take an instant dislike to her and change his mind.

Today, while many couples enjoy the drama of the groom getting a vision of his bride for the first time as she walks down the aisle, others don’t like missing cocktail hour to pose for portraits. Photographers came up with a work-around in order to take pictures before the ceremony without inviting bad luck: the “first look” is just that—a moment set up by and for the camera, when the bride and groom see each other in their wedding finery for the first time before the ceremony begins.

Just before the ceremony itself, observant Jewish grooms will celebrate with the groomsmen at a tisch (the Yiddish word for table). The guys eat, drink, and (gently) heckle the groom as he tries to display his erudition by giving a speech. While the men are making merry, the bride sits on a throne like a queen, entertained by her ladies as they dance for her while music plays. The gender-segregated gatherings end when the groom and his friends dance over to the bride’s party for the signing of the ketubah (the marriage contract). Next comes the bedeken, or “veiling,” in which the groom lifts the bride’s veil to see her face, then replaces it, ensuring he is marrying the woman he proposed to, and not getting the old switcheroo, as in the biblical story of Rachel and Leah. Today, some Jewish couples open their pre-vow gatherings to friends of either gender. Others prefer to be led to each other backward before they turn and see that the other person is, in fact, their intended, in a gender-neutral “veiling,” but with no veils required.

In India, a rousing game of joota chupai, or “stealing the shoes,” is played before, during, and immediately after the ceremony. When the groom takes off his ornate slippers before stepping onto the platform where the ritual will take place, one of the bride’s relatives grabs them and ferrets them away to an undisclosed location. His relatives try to steal them back or discover their hiding place as the long ceremony continues. Once it’s over and he needs his shoes to leave, he has to pay a ransom to get them back. It’s all done with a playful attitude meant to kick off a lifetime of both families celebrating together.

Whatever your religion, a few pre-vow drinks, songs, and laughs with friends and family can help you relax and focus on the joyous ceremony ahead, instead of sweating the small stuff.