Oh yeah. We also ate my grandmother and burned her husband. Yeah. That's the ticket.

I have to apologize - I've exagerated here. There was no hanging. The hanging was prevented by the gunfight.

Here's the story.

It wasn't really a "western" wedding or anything, but our reception was held on a ranch in a barn that has been converted into a hall. And while the decor of the hall is somewhat western, that wasn't the theme. It was a pretty standard wedding. I wore a black tux, my wife wore a white dress. No one wore cowboy boots, well, except for the cowboys, but that comes later.

A good friend of my families has done wild west reenactments for as long as I can remember, so we asked him if he and his friends would provide some entertainment in the gap between the ceremony and the reception. Now, I never actually saw the show - we were off having pictures taken, but we heard the shots. Apparently, this is how it went down:

A sheriff and six duputies, all with rifles and six guns and carrying a wanted poster with my wife's brother on it showed up. They searched the crowd until they found my brother-in-law, and arrested him for various crimes committed against his sister. They tied his hands, and put a noose around his neck. They were just looking for a suitable tree to string him up when ten heavily armed hombres showed up and demanded his release. A wild gunfight ensued. None of the would-be rescuers survived, and only the sheriff survived on the other side.

In the end, everyone was entertained, and we have a wedding photo that epitomizes the phrase "shotgun wedding". I'll have to try and find it....

There is so much hypocrisy and double standards involved in today's weddings, its just nauseating.

1. Why the hell do brides wear white? That is a symbol of purity and virginity. Brides these days are far from being a pure innocent virgins they pretend to be in wedding ceremonies.

2. Why do grooms pay for everything in the wedding including the honeymoon ? Do these guys not realize that the woman they are marrying was giving pornstar sex to the guys from her college football team ?
There is nothing special about her so stop putting her on a pedestal.
The groom is going to be trapped in a sexless marriage while the wife fantasizes about the bad boys she got ravaged by in highschool.

3. Why do people go to bachelor or bachelorette parties ? Everyone ends up having sex with total strangers like strippers and prostitutes and then pretend to be innocent in public.

After all this decadence, people have the nerve to say "oh marriages are made in heaven, they are holy, sanctimonious institutions that make people happy blah blah blah"

Bitter much?

Around here the custom is that the bride's parents pay for the wedding, and it supposedly is rooted in the idea of a dowry. The groom still generally pays for the honeymoon.

Our wedding was pretty much split in thirds - my parents, her parents, and us.

Which reminds me, after the ceremony, we use to whip the bride, beat the groom within an inch (centimeter here) then burn their house. For good luck, so nothing like that happens to them again. We also prevent any potential financial jinx by taking away all their earthly posessions. And if anybody else feels superstitious we graciously extend the favour.

And did I mention the bride is to spend first five years of joyous marriage union living in the basement until she proves her status as a wannabe human being. It the olden days, we wouldn't even joke about letting the property imagine itself as anything other than an expendable domesticated animal, but human rights movements have done wonders. Yeah, then she's upgraded to the barn or kennel, whichever is at hand, for the next half decade when her blindfold is removed and she is able to glance at her dear husband for the very first time. Depending on her reaction, the love-inducing measure is prolongued for another decade, until she finishes her training.

Needless to say, immediately after the marriage ceremony her whole family is being sold to best buyer, to cover the costs of feeding her with swines' leftovers. If dogs are not hungry.

Nothing like the honeymonn, ha India?

To make sure the dishwasher matches the refrigerator.

To teach her that her money now only comes from a man.

To have sex. Duh.


For real, everyone's different. I and my wife were virgins for our wedding (25 and 26 years old). We didn't have sex or strippers at the parties. And my wife, her fam and my fam paid for the wedding and I saved up for the honeymoon.

Yeah, I guess a test is a weird wedding custom. Thank you for participating Tallima.

I had a bracket backwards in my post and it would do really weird stuff when I tried to post. But it's all good now. Yay!

Don't mind me, I'm having a really off day. I've been overcome by a strange combination of boredom, depression, and melancholy. I have no clue what the hell any of my posts mean. :P

You're always a hoot. Even when you're off.

Is it snowing yet up there?

Here are some interesting wedding choices I have seen or heard about:

1. A community band director. This was an outdoor wedding with informal dress. (Note that the weather was hot this day.) He had a community group that he directed play music during the ceremony and during the (outdoor) reception. This one I attended.

2. Bride and groom from different traditions. In the case I heard of, they had two weddings; one (East) Indian wedding and one Catholic wedding, on consecutive days.

3. Same-sex weddings. Sometimes, in a lesbian wedding, one of the brides will wear a tux while the other wears a wedding dress. That is not always the case, and there are weddings where *both* brides wear wedding dresses. Also, the traditional line "I pronounce you man and wife" is right out; in one wedding I heard about, the line was changed to "I pronounce you...married." (The "..." indicates a pause here.) Note that same-sex marriage is recent enough that traditions have not had time to develop, so every couple handles it differently.

Would you believe it got up to 65 today!? We should have ten feet on the ground and here I am walking around in a T and ripped jeans. :P

(Emphasize added by me)

...
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Wat?

(:

German weddings are actually fairly run-of-the-mill by European and American standards. We do have a couple of traditions to call our own:

* Cutting the bedsheets - the bridal pair is given two pairs of scissors and they have to cut a heart in a bedsheet. The groom then carries the bride through (theoretically, doesn't always work that way).

* Log cutting - I shit you not. It's actually German tradition to have the wedding couple work together to saw through a log. It's fairly common to be lumped with a blunt saw to begin with as a gag.

* He/she - Actually a wedding game, where the wedding couple sits back-to-back on chairs and is given a stick with a piece of cardboard. The husband has "Me" and "Her" on each side, the wife has "Me" and "Him". They're asked questions with the aim of getting the same answers. What happens then depends on the wedding - at ours we had to down shots for every wrong question (2 out of 25).
Funnily enough, having two weddings is perfectly normal in Germany. That actually has a legal background - in the interest of the separation of church and state, a church/mosque/synagogue wedding is not deemed legal in the eyes of the law, so religious people tend to have one wedding with a registrar and one in their religious institution.

I'm atheist and my wife didn't see the point in spending more money on a church wedding, so we only had the one.