Keep the wedding traditions, change them, or skip them alltogether
A quick note before we begin: I am a white wedding coordinator based in Vancouver, Canada whose own family wedding traditions are relatively mainstream, and I don’t come from any particular cultural or religious background that has played a part in my family’s wedding experiences. The perspective of this article comes from years of coordinating weddings for couples with many different traditions, cultures, religions, and family dynamics, not from personal lived experience. My goal here isn’t to explain to you the meaning behind these traditions or to tell you whether you should include them. Instead, I hope to give you thoughtful questions to ask while you’re planning your wedding so you can make informed, respectful decisions about the traditions that matter to you and your families.
What is a wedding tradition?
My favourite saying is “traditions are just dead people telling us what to do.” While this is a dramatic oversimplification, wedding traditions go back centuries, and many of the things we see today have surprisingly old origins. And while they can be beautiful and meaningful, it’s important that you take a tradition and examine it for your purposes, not just because someone said “this is how we do it”. To be clear, I do not recommend upsetting the dead by throwing traditions away completely; I want you to give them the proper consideration they deserve.
I love reading into the roots and symbolism of traditions because, well, I work in weddings. It’s interesting to know the lore of the things that we do, and after these 10 years in business, and 28 years with a hyper fixation on weddings, I have certainly developed my opinions about wedding traditions. My most important opinion is “this wedding is about the two of you and what you want to make it”. Yes, we should listen to our parents (particularly if they’re wedding donors! Read more about that here), we should listen to the opinions of people we care about, but listening doesn’t need to be action. Listening is an act we do to show our care. Acting on the things we hear is something else.
The best way to make choices on traditions with your wedding day is to know what the traditions are. It’s so much easier to say “I don’t want to do that” when you know you need to say “I don’t want to do that”. I hope that these lists help you to figure out what to include and not include in your wedding day.
How to decide to keep a wedding tradition
To decide if you want to include a tradition, sometimes we don’t need to be so analytical about it, we can simply say “obviously” or “gross, no, I’m not doing that”, and that’s awesome. But some decisions are harder. Like “I don’t want my dad to walk me down the aisle because I’m not property BUT I do love my parents and want them with me.” ( I have a blog post about the patriarchy and traditions you should check out if this sounds like you). So when we come up to those harder decisions, I need you to ask yourself 6 things.
Six steps for tradition decisions
- Start with your values – “I believe I am my own person. I love my parents deeply. I care about how my decisions impact the other people around me. I believe that my wedding isn’t the start of our journey, but the continuation of our lives together.”
- Consider your families – “Dad has always mused at dancing with me on my wedding day.” Maybe even have a conversation with your parents about this
- Consider your culture and religion “Grandpa gave away mom, but my cousin just had both of her parents walk her down the aisle”
- Consider your guests – do you care what they would think/say? “Grandma is a passive aggressive gossip and whatever I do, if she doesn’t agree, I will hear about it for the rest of my life”
- Consider your logistics – (for this example, this one barely applies) “If dad didn’t walk me down the aisle, would he walk down the aisle at all?”
- Make your decision and inform those who would be impacted – “Dad, I love you and our relationship so much, but I think that I can’t come to terms with the idea of a property exchange between you and my partner. I would like to talk down the aisle with my partner and have you and mom walk down the aisle together first.”
Onto the traditions
Traditions before the wedding day
We see traditions like wedding showers and bachelorette & bachelor parties a lot. The purpose behind a bridal shower is to “shower” the bride with gifts that she will need to help keep a good home for her husband eyeroll. It has taken on a different meaning in the last few decades. Most couples are living together before the wedding. Sometimes we ask our guests for no gifts, recipes, lingerie, stock the bar parties, or just to come and celebrate the bride. I have seen some couples host a wedding shower that was exclusively for crafts for the wedding itself. A wedding shower can be for whatever purpose you want to give it. Same with bachelor(ette) parties. These were to help men “sow their wild oats” before they were tied down to the same woman forever. With how relationships work now, we see this less as a “sow your oats” party, and more of a celebration of friendship for the individual being celebrated. They are still primarily separated by gender, but more and more (as we realize that platonic friendships are a thing) they are co-ed. Some couples even elect to celebrate this event in tandem – they may start apart but they end up together by the end of the night.
Traditions:
- Engagement Party
- Bridal Shower
- Wedding Shower
- Bachelor party
- Bachelorette party
- Having a wedding (ELOPE!)
Traditions before the ceremony
The ceremony itself is RIPE with tradition because weddings weren’t always an excuse for a party, so the ceremony has been around for far longer than the party. Pre wedding ceremony traditions range from cultural (Chinese Tea Ceremony), religious (wearing a veil), to family (burying a sausage). Some of my favourite traditions though are the weird superstitions that we carry with us, like “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a six pence in her shoe”. Where did that come from? What is the point? It’s just a fun rhyme but it’s so mainstream now that it’s not uncommon to hear someone ask at a wedding “are you wearing something blue?!”
Did you know that the bridal veil comes from many different origin points? There are some religious origins where you wear a veil to cover your head in respect, and some cultural origins where a man would trade his daughter for some prize and he would cover her face so that the groom won’t see her beauty (or lack-there-of) prior to being sealed in marriage. This is important to consider when choosing your traditions. Just because one origin point might give you the heebie jeebies, another might inspire warmth and joy.
Traditions:
- Not seeing each other before the ceremony (see above for practice of treating women as property for the origin on this one)
- Wearing a veil
- Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue
- Tea ceremony
- Having a wedding party; keeping it gender specific
- Burying a sausage for good weather (this is very Germanic, I love it)
Traditions to consider for you ceremony
As I mentioned in my disclaimer, I am, culturally speaking, the equivalent of white bread. Mild, familiar, and not particularly nutrient dense. So, with this being said, I might miss some traditions here, but these are the ones I have experience with. The one caveat I will give you is if in a church, you may have no choice in some of these traditions. If you choose to get married in a Catholic Church, you’re making the decision to take on the traditions set forth by that church. You can have conversations with your church coordinator about certain items, but many are immovable. I once had a couple who didn’t want to have children, but wanted to be married in a specific church. They were told that that part of the ceremony where they’re instructed to have children was a part of the ceremony if they were married there and there was no choice. So make sure you have these conversations prior to aligning with a venue.
Traditions:
- Having an aisle (venue depending) – I really like the circular ceremony set-up that’s like a maze for the couple to walk through!
- Wedding parties standing up with you
- Walking down the aisle in a specific order or with specific people
- Flower children or ring bearers
- Wedding party processional or recessional
- Signing the marriage license during the ceremony (many sign before or after)
- Personal vows
- Exchanging rings
- Unity ceremonies
- Ring warming
- Throwing confetti/rice/bubbles (note, many venues don’t allow for any of these options!)
- Having a Sofreh (Persian cultural and religious tradition)
- Having a Chuppah (Jewish cultural and religious tradition)
Traditions we see post ceremony & during cocktail hour
Cocktail hours haven’t been around long, because formerly, the wedding would be in two separate venues – a church and then some sort of hall – but with the onset of one stop shops for venues where everything is at one address, cocktail hours came into play, and there’s lots of reasons why, but more than anything, it was to accommodate for the time the couple needed to take photos after the ceremony. When there is no first look (aka the couple don’t see each other before the ceremony) more time is needed to get the formal photos of everyone. I maintain that right after the ceremony is the only appropriate time for scheduled group photos from a logistics point of view (people are like cats, impossible to heard), but there are traditions, albeit new ones, to consider here.
Traditions:
- Large group photo will all your guests
- Couple portraits during cocktail hour (ditch these and have a first look!)
- Having a cocktail hour – or having it at this point! Have the cocktail hour first so your guests are on time for the ceremony!
Traditions at receptions
Wedding receptions haven’t been around as long as the ceremony, and they haven’t always looked like they do now (more people want to be at your reception these days than the ceremony!) but they still have traditions all over them. My favourite fun tradition fact is something I get to share whenever I ask a question in our details meeting about the bouquet toss and the garter toss. We don’t need to have whomever catches the bouquet and garter to be about who’s getting married next; that’s not how this tradition started. This tradition started back when women longed to be married, to get the freedom to be out from under their father’s rule and into a home where her husband was her boss (am I sounding like an angry feminist yet?). This was the best luck that a woman could have, SO, when attending a wedding, the single women would literally rip the clothes off of the bride’s body in order to obtain some of that good luck. Brides then began throwing their bouquets and later on garters, to shift the narrative. “Don’t rip off my clothes” – not effective. “Here compete for a piece of my marital luck” – no more clothes being torn off. So the tradition stems from luck. I try to help reframe this tradition whenever I can because I LOVE it. They are my favourite random traditions on a wedding day, and I see them less and less.
Traditions:
- Reception Entrance
- Wedding party reception entrance
- Head table or sweetheart table
- Speeches
- Champagne toast (this is the one I have the biggest gripe with – we end up tossing so much bubbly!)
- Cake & cake cutting
- First dance
- Parent dances
- Bouquet toss
- Garter toss
- Grand exit
Modern Traditions you may want to include
There are always wedding fads, and some of them turn to tradition. Look at Queen Victoria! She made the white dress the tradition it is today because she simply wore a white dress. White was opulence. White was a colour that was impractical. And now, so are weddings.
Traditions:
- A first look
- Private vows
- Signing a marriage license at a first look
- Wedding hashtags
- Unplugged ceremonies
- Shoe game
- Signature Drinks
Wedding traditions to include in your wedding
At the end of the day, this wedding is yours. You might want it to be a celebration of your relationship, or a celebration of your families coming together. You might be doing it because you want to experience a wedding, or because it’s expected of you. There are 100s of traditions that I only scraped the surface here of, but what I know, after having personally been at over 250 weddings; the best weddings are the ones not where every tradition is included, nor the ones where every tradition was rejected. The very best are the ones where every choice was made intentionally. Where the couple asked “does this feel like us” or “does this add meaning to our celebration” and “are we doing this because we want this or because we think we should”. Weddings are hard to navigate, don’t make it harder on yourself by doing things because they’re expected of you.