Hi, friends! I just got MARRIED and am now on my honeymoon in Aruba!!! I won’t be able to attend to my blog this week since Shane and I are having fun in the sun and relaxing, but not to worry — I’ve left my blog in good hands. All this week, I have a series of guest post-ers (and they all have some pretty great posts!
Today’s guest post is from Nikki McCormack, author of The Girl and the Clockwork Cat, and she has a guest post for us today to fit with the wedding theme! Check out the five weird and wacky wedding traditions that she gathered up for everyone today!
Five Weird and Wacky Wedding Traditions
Getting married can be an exciting and nerve-wracking experience. Promising yourself to another person for life is a substantial commitment. Promising yourself to another person for life with an audience of friends and family looking on, like some kind of Broadway performance, just makes it that much more intimidating. It could be worse though. Count yourself lucky if you don’t have to go through one of these five peculiar wedding traditions while tying the knot.
- Blackening – A lovely custom still held in parts of Scotland where the bride or groom (sometimes both) have buckets full of a gross mixture thrown over them (usually the day before the wedding) and are then tied to a tree. After going through this, they can certainly handle the trials of marriage.
- Happy Tears – For the Tujia people in China, as an expression of joy, the bride is supposed to cry for one hour every day starting a month before the wedding. Ten days into the month, the mother joins her, and ten days after that her grandmother starts. By the end of the month, every female in the bride’s family is crying with her.
- Shoe Fight – In parts of India, the groom is required to take off his shoes while walking to the altar. The groom’s family has to protect the shoe while the bride’s family tries to steal it. Let’s hope the two families get along or this could get ugly.
- Blessed by Spit – At a Massai wedding in Kenya the bride’s father may bless his daughter by spitting on her head and breasts before she leaves the village with her new husband.
- Picking a date – A bride and groom of the Daur in Chinese Inner Mongolia determine the wedding date by killing a baby chick while holding the knife together. They gut the chick to inspect its liver and the date is decided by the appearance of the liver. If the liver looks bad, they repeat the process until they find a satisfactory liver. Not one for the squeamish.
While blackening sounds like it could be fun, as long as you’re not the one getting married, most of these traditions aren’t that appealing, at least to me. Fortunately for me, all I suffered for my marriage was a money dance after the ceremony. Given other options, I’m calling that a win.
Congratulations, Brittany!
Nikki McCormack is the author of The Girl and the Clockwork Cat, the first book in a steampunk YA series from Entangled Teen (September 2014). She started writing her first novel at the age of 12, which she still has tucked in a briefcase in her home office, waiting for the right moment. Despite a successful short story publication with Cricket Magazine in 2007, she continued to treat her writing addiction as a hobby until a drop in the economy presented her with an abundance of free time that she used to focus on making it her career.
Nikki lives in the magnificent Pacific Northwest tending to her husband and three cats suffering varying stages of neurosis. She feeds her imagination by sitting on the ocean in her kayak gazing out across the never-ending water or hanging from a rope in a cave, embraced by darkness and the sound of dripping water. She finds peace through practicing iaido or shooting her longbow.
The Girl and the Clockwork Cat: Amazon, B&N, Goodreads
Nikki McCormack: Website, Twitter, Facebook
Thanks, Nikki! I have never heard of any of those before so that was so interesting to learn! I think I would agree with you… I’m glad none of those are traditions we have for our weddings! (Although shoe fight? That one could be fun…) They were all incredibly interesting to hear about and I wonder where some of them originated from…
A huge thanks to Nikki McCormack for guest posting on the blog today! What do you think of the five weird and wacky traditions? Have you heard of any of them before? Do any of them sound appealing to you? (Shoe fight, anyone?)
And don’t forget to check out Nikki’s book, The Girl and the Clockwork Cat, on Goodreads!
2 thoughts on “Guest Post from author Nikki McCormack: Five Weird and Wacky Wedding Traditions”
This was very fun! I’ve never heard of any of these traditions before, but I wouldn’t want to be a part of them. I mean crying every day for a whole month? That kind of sounds depressing not joyful. And blackening doesn’t sound so bad…but I definitely wouldn’t want to gut a chick. Shoe fight sounds like fun, but maybe a bit too distracting from the main event?