Wedding Blog

Mr. CC and I really wanted a way to incorporate our heritage into our wedding. Mr. CC is mostly Irish, and is able to trace his ancestry back into the early 1600s. My family is a little more diverse, lots of German and the rest is Irish and English.

The weekend we got engaged, Mr. CC kept talking about wanting a Claddagh ring.

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A few weeks after our engagement, Mr. CC went back to Savannah and got himself (from me, of course!) a Claddagh. He wears it wrong (on his left hand with the heart pointed towards his fingernail), but that’s okay. We are looking for a nicer Claddagh for his wedding band.

And when I saw this Druid astrology on Martha Stewart’s site, I knew we had to put it in our programs.

Other Irish traditions include wearing a blue dress (nope, not happening) and getting married on St. Patrick’s Day. It is also traditional for the bride and groom to walk to the chapel together. Onlookers would not only throw rice to bless the marriage, but often pots and pans as well (ouch!). Honeymoons also have their roots in Ireland. The newlyweds would spend a month in seclusion, drinking honeyed wine, in case their parents disapproved. Tradition says the bride would be pregnant after a month in seclusion and then her family would desire for her to stay with her husband.

Then I started researching German and English traditions, mostly just for kicks, although I did find some interesting ideas:

The tradition of having a best man is German. Apparently, the groom sometimes needed help stealing his bride from her village and would enlist his “best man” to help. Germans also plant trees when a baby girl is born and when she gets engaged, they cut them down and sell them for her dowry. A unique custom is the wedding newspaper, which is created by the couple’s friends and families and sold at the reception to fund the honeymoon. I might do this, although I suppose it depends on how many other projects are left, and no, we will not sell it.

The English consider rain on the wedding day good luck. A reception tradition is the ribbon pull, where the bridesmaids pull charms out of the cake for luck and fortune. I understand this is a common tradition in The South, and we may be incorporating it. The traditional English wedding cake is a fruitcake (also not happening) and the groom’s cake has its roots in the Tudor period. The flower girl is also an English tradition.

How are you incorporating your heritage into your wedding?

all traditions found on WorldWeddingTraditions