Kimberly Emerson

Winter is changing into spring here in the northern hemisphere, and as usual in Los Angeles, you can’t tell.   The only way to know any time of year is by looking in the store windows, to see whether the Christmas decorations are up.  (If they are, you know it’s September.)  Perhaps it is our lack of opportunity to denote rite of passage that cause us to so embrace the ultimate ritual – the wedding.

No, that can’t be it, because Los Angeles isn’t alone in its wedding mania.  Perhaps it’s a mutation in our DNA.  Who knows.  For whatever reason, it has come to be accepted that every person will, at some point in their lives (and perhaps more than once) celebrate their love for another person by spending a year’s salary on the party to end all parties.  If you and your mate have not accumulated enough debt to rival a third-world country, you have not spent enough, and we, your guests, can only conclude that you don’t really love each other.  We give you a year, two at the outside.

The average bride and groom in the United States spend almost $40,000 on their wedding.  While I, as a single woman, may envy their ability to dictate to their friends what gifts they should give, I don’t miss having to save up my half for this ceremony.  If I want new dishes and flatware, well, $20,000 buys an awful lot of it, and I don’t have to write thank-you notes.   It is the priciest ceremony in which most Americans will ever participate.  By contrast, we spend only $10,000 apiece on funerals.  (I will say that at many weddings that I’ve been to, the food is professionally catered and there’s entertainment.  At funerals, the food is usually provided by potluck from the church ladies, God bless them, and the only thing to do is watch people cry.)

It wasn’t always thus.  Weddings have, of course, been a part of society for thousands of years, and they were big shindigs in ancient Egyptian and Roman times.  (It’s from the Romans that we get the word matrimony (matrimonialis), derived from “mater” – which just goes to show that weddings have always been about your mother.) But in early America, most women simply wore their best dress, whatever color or style it chanced to be.  Farm and frontier women just wore the nicest of the dresses they would have worn to church. 

Queen Victoria’s choice of a white wedding dress was a sensation, since up to then, white wasn’t the color of purity.  (Blue was, actually, and many brides picked that if they had the choice, for that very reason.  Interesting that blue later became the color for second weddings. Purer of intention, maybe, since they figured this time you knew what you were doing?)  But the white caught on, and all of a sudden it became the done thing for upper class women to get married in white.  (And what the upper classes will do, the rest of us will fruitlessly try to follow.  Sad but true.)

Interesting note, though: during the Depression era, the custom reverted.  It was seen as inappropriate to buy new clothes (and to most, probably just unrealistic.)  Women again got married in the best clothes they already had.  If they bought a new dress, it was something that actually could be worn again.  (Unlike every bridesmaid dress ever worn in our modern era, no matter what the bride tries to tell you.)   During World War II, this decision was reinforced by the scarcity of fabric.  It was perfectly acceptable to wear someone else’s dress or to rent one.

In light of our current economic situation, I wonder what will happen to the tradition of weddings.  I know of two couples getting married this year.  One is having a traditional ceremony and reception, but has allowed a budget of only $10,000, far below the norm.  The other is opting for an informal party at their house.  Could it be that America is finally realizing that starting your married life deeply in debt does not guarantee marital bliss?  Might we finally acknowledge that our standards for weddings have become a trifle overblown?  Let’s hope so.  If they have the money, by all means, let people have the wedding of their dreams and stimulate the economy.  But if they don’t, maybe we, their loved ones, should let them off the hook.  “Something borrowed” should not refer to money from Visa, and “something blue” should not be the happy couple’s mood when they get the bills.  After all, the important part of the day isn’t the fabulous dress or the beautiful flowers – it’s the fact that in this scary world of “don’t,” two people have opted to say “I do.”

Well, that and cake.  Skimp on everything else, but have good cake.