Wedding traditions
Jul. 8th, 2007 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sister_luckYesterday one of my colleagues married her partner. I went to the ceremony and to the party in the evening and it got me thinking about different traditions and ways of celebrating weddings.
My colleague is a good Catholic girl from the country, but this was her second marriage, so they only had the civil ceremony. The setting was the Rousseau Room in a castle and now I have to do some research why the room is called that, though I suspect it has got something to do with the wall decorations. The registrar used way too many metaphors (marriage is like a roller-coaster, a carousel, a game of tennis (doubles) etc.) but he made it personal and it was a nice ceremony.
It was a very traditional affair - with the guys from the Schützenverein in their uniforms standing by the door to greet the newly-weds and the husband's mates from the voluntary fire brigade had assembled outside the castle's gates with their shiny fire engines. There was a huge ladder with a fire hose and the happy couple had to unscrew parts of it or something like that. They also made a lot of noise with their sirens and even had a canon to salute them. Someone had decorated an old red Hanomag tractor with flowers and then there was a motorcade back to the village with the fire engines and the bride and bridegroom sitting on the wheels of the tractor. I thought all of that was very cute.
The party itself was a typical village affair at the in-law's farmhouse in the yard. Half the village was there and I realized that this is a life that I know nothing about because I grew up in the suburbs. The music was godawful - I'd always wondered who actually listened to and bought the crappy Ballermann type music with a relentless plastic techno beat and silly lyrics. The dj didn't have a clue what he was doing - stopping the music all the time for the audience to sing along in the breaks, but his timing was crap. Even when the songs were old disco or Schlager classics, the versions played were pseudo-techno remixes. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the bunch of teachers who were there (including me and the poor boyfriend who didn't know what had hit him) made a complete ass of themselves with a silly skit that involved a semi-humourous re-enactment of the wedding ceremony with bits of song thrown in which were accompanied by an accordion.
We left pretty early. I felt very out of place and as the designated driver I couldn't get drunk. When we got home, we had to purge the awful music out of our system and watched the last installment of Seven Ages of Rock and then watched Glastonbury 2004's Franz Ferdinand and Muse concerts.
My colleague is a good Catholic girl from the country, but this was her second marriage, so they only had the civil ceremony. The setting was the Rousseau Room in a castle and now I have to do some research why the room is called that, though I suspect it has got something to do with the wall decorations. The registrar used way too many metaphors (marriage is like a roller-coaster, a carousel, a game of tennis (doubles) etc.) but he made it personal and it was a nice ceremony.
It was a very traditional affair - with the guys from the Schützenverein in their uniforms standing by the door to greet the newly-weds and the husband's mates from the voluntary fire brigade had assembled outside the castle's gates with their shiny fire engines. There was a huge ladder with a fire hose and the happy couple had to unscrew parts of it or something like that. They also made a lot of noise with their sirens and even had a canon to salute them. Someone had decorated an old red Hanomag tractor with flowers and then there was a motorcade back to the village with the fire engines and the bride and bridegroom sitting on the wheels of the tractor. I thought all of that was very cute.
The party itself was a typical village affair at the in-law's farmhouse in the yard. Half the village was there and I realized that this is a life that I know nothing about because I grew up in the suburbs. The music was godawful - I'd always wondered who actually listened to and bought the crappy Ballermann type music with a relentless plastic techno beat and silly lyrics. The dj didn't have a clue what he was doing - stopping the music all the time for the audience to sing along in the breaks, but his timing was crap. Even when the songs were old disco or Schlager classics, the versions played were pseudo-techno remixes. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the bunch of teachers who were there (including me and the poor boyfriend who didn't know what had hit him) made a complete ass of themselves with a silly skit that involved a semi-humourous re-enactment of the wedding ceremony with bits of song thrown in which were accompanied by an accordion.
We left pretty early. I felt very out of place and as the designated driver I couldn't get drunk. When we got home, we had to purge the awful music out of our system and watched the last installment of Seven Ages of Rock and then watched Glastonbury 2004's Franz Ferdinand and Muse concerts.
