20 Wedding Traditions That Get Weirder Once You Know Their Origins

Contrary to popular assumption, the white wedding dress didn’t originally symbolize purity—not even when Queen Victoria herself married Prince Albert in 1840 with a white satin garment trimmed with handmade Honiton lace. That symbolism was popularized decades later by the Victorian fashion press. At that time, white dresses merely signified wealth, primarily because the color required expensive upkeep. One other reason that the dress was worn: it was a deliberate boost to Britain’s lace trade.

One of the most chaotic parts of a wedding is the bouquet toss. I’ve seen women push others to get ahold of the bride’s bouquet, as catching it signifies that you’ll be the next one in line to get married. The bouquet toss wasn’t always a game, though. It was crowd control. According to accounts of 14th-century French and English weddings, guests believed that getting a piece of the bride’s gown brought good luck, and mobs would sometimes tear at her clothing to get it. To get to the bridal chamber unscathed, brides threw bouquets to create a distraction.

The garter toss, which is seen as a controversial wedding tradition today, has its origins in Medieval times. In those days, wedding guests would sometimes follow the bride and groom into the bedroom until it was proven that the union had been consummated. To keep the crowd out and protect the bride, the groom would remove her garter and throw it out the door.

The Roman writer Aulus Gellius noted a belief that there was a certain vein that led directly from the fourth finger of the left hand into the heart. This “vena amoris” does not actually exist, but the belief persisted long enough to influence which finger in the West has worn wedding rings for centuries.

Have you ever wondered where the word “wedding” comes from? Well, the word “wedd” in Old English referred to a pledge or guarantee. A groom paid this security deposit to a bride’s male guardian in exchange for his marriage contract with her. Laws mentioning this practice from the 7th to 11th centuries appear in the 12th-century document Textus Roffensis. Though the word survives in English in an altered form, the romantic meaning is entirely our invention.

The morgengifu, or morning gift, was a gift that Anglo-Saxon law required a husband to give to his wife the morning after their wedding night. The husband gave his wife land, money, or livestock, which she owned independently of him. This was one of the few ways a woman could attain a measure of financial independence in the early Middle Ages.

During the Victorian era, wedding cakes were often covered in royal icing, a glaze of refined sugar and egg whites that dried into a dense and impenetrable shell. The groom’s hand placed over the bride’s was meant to help cut through the concrete-like exterior. But this practical necessity was later reinterpreted as a romantic ritual.

After the wedding was over, church bells were rung violently to shatter any curses and drive away evil spirits thought to prowl around the newlyweds. The peals weren’t just for human ears. The idea that physical commotion could interrupt folk magic was well-documented in high medieval Europe.

In Celtic and Norse communities, there was once a ritual known as handfasting, in which a couple’s hands were bound with ribbons or cords. The literal tying of hands represented a legally binding union, and it is the source of the expression “tying the knot.”

You may occasionally see tin cans hanging on the back of a couple’s car after they get married. This custom dates back to medieval France and the charivari, later known as the shivaree. It consisted of people banging pots and pans outside the newlyweds’ house to scare away spirits and haze the couple on their wedding night.

Although it’s a common belief that honeymoon comes from the thirty days of drinking honey mead after a wedding, this account is actually just a piece of folklore. In fact, the term honeymoon was first written down by English writers John Heywood (1546) and Richard Huloet (1552), who used the word cynically to say that the sweet honeymoon stage was fleeting, like the waxing and waning of the moon.

The ancient Romans believed that doorways were dangerous places, guarded by gods such as Vesta, and thought that tripping upon entering a new home was an extremely unlucky omen. So the groom carried the bride across the threshold, holding her securely so her feet never touched the ground, an act that the Greek historian Plutarch wrote about centuries ago, making this far more than a modern romantic gesture.

Pliny the Elder wrote in his text Natural History about the annulus pronubus: the simple iron ring given by Roman grooms to their brides as a legal confirmation that they had agreed to a financial betrothal. These rings were far from charming, made for practicality rather than affection.

The sixpence tucked into the bride’s left shoe wasn’t for vanity’s sake, but a charm to attract financial prosperity. It’s part of an old rhyme that goes, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a sixpence in her shoe,” with the color blue also serving as a charm against the Evil Eye. The rhyme is first recorded in 1871, in Lancashire folklore.

The wedding veil likely descended from the flammeum, a heavy, flame-colored veil that fully covered the Roman bride from head to toe. Ancient writers, including the poet Catullus and the historian Pliny, referred to the flammeum in their accounts of Roman weddings.

Ancient Romans showered the newly married couple with raw wheat and barley as an offering to Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, to ensure their union would be blessed with fertility and prosperity. This was most likely the precursor to the showers of rice or confetti thrown at couples today.

“Giving away” the bride wasn’t a blessing. Women were classified as dependents in early Germanic and Anglo-Saxon law, under a doctrine known as mundium, or guardianship. The act had nothing to do with blessing the marriage; it was a legal transfer of a woman’s mundium from her father to her husband, as recorded in surviving law codes.

Before America’s groom’s cake tradition, the Victorians often included a dark, liquor-laced cake for the groom. Unmarried girls at the reception would take home boxed slices and put them under their pillow; that night they might dream of the man they were fated to marry.

While a popular legend attributes the bridal shower’s origin to Dutch villagers who supposedly “showered” a bride with gifts when her father denied her a dowry, the first known celebrations actually took place during the late 19th century in urban America. During this time, people gathered before weddings to bestow household items on the bride as she prepared to establish her new home.

Enslaved Black people in the antebellum South were not permitted to legally marry, so couples created their own sacred ceremonies complete with community sanction. Documented by scholars such as Dr. Tyler D. Parry, leaping over a broom that sat upon the ground represented couples crossing over into a united future, leaving (sweeping) the past behind.

This content was created with the help of AI.