One of my guilty pleasures during quarantine has been reading the Reddits Relationships and Am I the Asshole. They’re very moreish, alternately amusing and enraging, particularly when consumed via the twitter versions @redditships and @AITA_reddit. They offer a filtered ‘best of’, with quick and easily browsed postings.
My favorite in recent days was this story featuring a bride with a bizarre wedding night ritual. While most newly married couples simply depart for their honeymoon after the wedding, this bride’s family expects them to consummate the marriage while the clan gathers outside the bedroom door. Then they all cheer when the happy and slightly sweaty couple emerge. Some of the bed linen is kept to add to what can only be described as a family fuck blanket.
It’s an insane tradition that nobody should ever follow, but it does make me wish the bride and groom would take the chance to turn the tables on their nosy relatives. They could arrive at the door with bags bulging with rope, coiled leather implements and jiggly rubber outfits. Make the relatives wait for an hour or two outside while creating lots of strange and disturbing noises. Then, just when they think it’s all over, have the bride pop her head out the door and say – “Sorry. We’re totally in the zone here. Killer scene. Could one of you pop down to the kitchen and bring me some clothespins and the big wooden spoon? Also, maybe the big bottle of Crisco?” That should clear the corridor of her parents and cousins pretty quickly.
I’m guessing this image has been cropped to remove the watermark, but I’m fairly certain it’s originally from The English Mansion.
Hmmm.
Certainly old fashioned but not completely unknown.
Check out this account of ‘bedding ceremonies’ from Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedding_ceremony
Also, in the Western Isles of Scotland, I have heard stories of a newly wedded couple being put to bed after the formalities whilst the families partied outside. I can’t find a proper reference for that, so have to rely on memory – but having said that, there is plenty of bizarre stuff going on in the Western Isles anyway …
Interesting. I’d heard of various informal customs around the wedding night in different cultures, but hadn’t realized there was such a formalized thing as a bedding ceremony used in so many of them.
The Iceland one sounds particularly stressful – “In Iceland, a marriage was only valid if it included the bedding ritual witnessed by at least six men.” I wonder how many Icelandic grooms got drunk at the wedding and failed to perform when all their friends were standing around? That’d be a tough story to live down!
-palteo
I’ve read about the more rural Italians and Greeks hanging a bedsheet out the window with a little blood on it, to “prove” that the bride was a virgin. And I’ve also read that understanding grandmothers might assist by giving the bride a little bit of chicken blood beforehand… just in case.
I’d heard of the animal blood trick before, but not the idea of putting a bed sheet out of the window. Humans can be really weird.
-paltego