Tampa Wedding Articles » Wedding Planning
There are many wedding traditions we take for granted, but having an understanding of where they come from or what their original meanings were make a wedding even more meaningful for a bridal couple.
Wine and Bread
One wedding ritual is the sharing of a cup of wine and a bite of bread during the wedding ceremony. Traditionally, this sharing of food and wine symbolized the beginning of a household for a couple as they began their life together. The sharing of food has historically symbolized the joining of families in marriage.
The Wedding Feast
Traditionally, a wedding feast was held to celebrate the marriage of two young people as a way for an entire village to join in the joy as they began their life together. Today, we celebrate the wedding feast as a wedding reception that usually not only includes a meal, but also sharing a wedding cake with all of the guests.
Wedding Gifts
In the past, couples were often very young when they were married and had little, if anything, to start a household. The entire community would join together to offer gifts to the happy couple as a blessing of their union and to help provide them with the basic necessities of beginning their lives together as a married couple.
Exchanging Rings
Wedding rings are usually worn on the ring finger – third finger from the index finger – because the ring finger was thought to be directly connected to the heart. Several hundred years in the past, only women wore wedding rings, which – though politically incorrect today – symbolized their status as owned property.
Honeymoon
There are a number of differing stories about the original meaning of the honeymoon period. Here are a few of the most common beliefs about the honeymoon:
Cementing the Relationship – It was not unusual for wedding couples to not know each other extremely well, if at all, before the wedding ceremony. For couples who belonged to wealthier families or who were part of the gentry classes, marriages were often financial contracts that joined the wealth of two families for financial benefit. As a result, a period of seclusion lasting at least a month (or a moon month) was considered advantageous to cementing a new marriage.
Month of Mead – Another traditional explanation of the honeymoon is that it was the tradition that the parents of the bridal couple supply a couple with enough honey and mead for an entire month, thus ensuring abundance and fertility for the couple.
Summary
Wedding traditions are deeply engrained in our culture, but we do not understand the many rituals and original source and meanings of those very same traditions. The sharing of a meal together to celebrate the joy at the joining of a couple in marriage is almost as ancient as human culture, as are providing a newly married couple with gifts and a period of seclusion.