Weddings: Let's Start a Revolution


Let’s ignore the fact that the world is going to Hell in the express lane and take on a smaller rant:  mega-weddings. 
            The average wedding in the United States will cost $25,500, less in some states, more in others (no shock their).   No, that does not include the honeymoon.  While you start thinking about everything a young couple could (SHOULD!) do with that kind of money, let me give you a bit of background.
While visiting a friend recently, we started looking at old family photos and came across a picture of her parents on their wedding day.  Her mother’s dress was a lovely floral print brocade, suitable for church, an afternoon tea or any occasion requiring what my mother would call a, “nice” outfit.   It was not a formal wedding gown.  There was a time (as recent as my 1968 marriage) when a wedding was a modest event.  There would be a small smattering of family and close friends.  The bride may have been in a wedding gown (like my mother’s) but it wasn’t required, and invariably reflected the financial means of the family.  The service would be followed by a reception (usually in the church basement or family home) that included cake, nuts, mints and punch.  If the family was so inclined there might be liquor.  If the guests broke into song and dance, so be it.  But the marriage was legal, locked down and paid for by the time the couple reached the church door.  
Things have not changed for the better.
 When did we decide that weddings should be expensive, expansive, and social occasion of pretentious proportions?  When did we decide to feed all these people a sit down dinner?  Or have an open bar that includes scotch too good to be appreciated by drunks?  Or spend money on music and dancing?  Or wear a dress fit for royalty?  Or feed the coffers of the florist, the photographer, or a, “wedding planner” for God’s sake!?!  This—all of this—is an artificial, contrived and purely egotistical affectation of unearned fame. 
Why?  What do we feel we owe our children that we will give them this ostentatious display of conspicuous consumption?  When did our children decide that their lives must be perfect?  Come to think of it, please define, “perfect.”  Certainly my definition would not include spending money on a transient event when you should be concentrating on a future together. 
I do understand that of all of life’s milestones:  birth, marriage, death, that the wedding is the only occasion where one actually has a conscious and active part.  But that means we are even more accountable for any mistakes made.   Under these circumstances, the bad taste that seems to be the life’s blood of mega-weddings only becomes more egregious.  
   I think it is past time for a revolution in weddings.  It may start with the participants; it may start with the parents required or requested to pay the cost of the wedding; it may even start with celebrities.  [The Bill and Melinda Gates wedding came in under the national average!  I guess if you’ve got it you don’t need to flaunt it.]  I think the next decade of weddings should be something more than statements of entitlement.  How about a small gathering of the people that really matter in one’s life—the one’s that will show up without being wined and dined?  How about choosing clothing instead of costumes?  How about an intimate group that comes together and talks (not texts) to one another after the ceremony?
How about choosing the right person and saying, “Our big day is ahead of us—one day at a time?” 
Think small and keep the faith.    

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Generation of Serfs

  On October 25, 1415, Henry V of England laid some serious hurt on the French at the Battle of Agincourt at Pas-de-Calais, France.   Part of the success of this campaign was due to Henry’s use of the longbow, but part of it also goes to the creative use of military indentures.   These legal contracts required all the English captains to provide specified amounts of men, material and time to the King’s cause.             An indenture was a document, written in duplicate and then torn along a jagged line, like little teeth ( dents ), in the paper.   One portion of the contract was in possession of each party and when the required conditions and period of service were fulfilled, the parts reunited, and the debt was considered paid.   Many of the people who first came to this country from England came as indentured servants, worked off their debt and became the backbone of the country.             Today we are creating a nation not of indentured servants, someone with a carefully
Read more

Our Beautiful Constitution and its Ugly Opponents

 The Constitution is our anchor of stability in a turbulent world!   We can withstand a bad President and a petulant Congress (for the short term, at least) because our Constitution both guides and limits.   If someone asked me to provide proof of a loving God, I would simply ask them how else so many geniuses in the matter of human governance could have been clustered together in the right time and place to create both our country and the means to govern it.    Our founding fathers had the vision to devise a way to not only govern themselves, but govern a country that they could not imagine, yet believed would prevail. The constitution of the United States is like a good parent.   It has allowed us to grow up as we have grown older, with the result that the United States of America is the oldest living democracy in the world.   The miracle of this document is that it lives, breathes and moves with the times.   The three branches of our government work together while standing alone
Read more

"You Didn't Build That:" Part I

Late in the day on Friday, July 13 th , President Obama mounted the stage of Historic Firehouse Number One in Roanoke , Virginia .   The room held around 800 people but it was hot and several people fainted.   In front of a carefully screened group of supporters he gave one of the most important speeches of his reelection campaign.    It was not meant to be a major speech.   That will come in the even more carefully scripted Convention Hall in Charlotte , North Carolina this September in front of adoring media and rabid political supporters.   But this speech in Roanoke is crucial to the 2012 election because on Friday, in Virginia , President Obama went off message.   Whether through error or hubris, he abandoned his script and spoke off the cuff.   And in so doing, he showed us the man behind the curtain.   The angry but controlled, insecure yet charismatic, market fearful, socialistically inclined man that Barrack Obama really is. I am speaking, of course, of the now famou
Read more