Etiquette of Weddings

A modern wedding is one of the most intricate and exhausting of social customs. Young men and women of our better classes are now forced to devote a large part of their lives to acting as brides, grooms, ushers and bridesmaids at various elaborate nuptials.

“Matrimony,” says Homer, the poet, “is a holy estate and not lightly to be entered into.” The “old Roman” is right. A modern wedding is one of the most intricate and exhausting of social customs. Young men and women of our better classes are now forced to devote a large part of their lives to acting as brides, grooms, ushers and bridesmaids at various elaborate nuptials. Weeks are generally required in preparation for an up-to-date wedding. Months are necessary in recovering from such an affair.

It was not “always thus.” Time was when the wedding was a comparatively simple affair. H. G. Wells of England points out in his able, “Outline of History,” there is no evidence of any particular ceremony conjunctive with the marriage of a “man and maid.” Even with the advent of Neolithic men, a wedding seems to have been consummated by the rather simple process of having the bridegroom “pop” the bride over the head with a plain, un-ornamented stone ax. There were no ushers and no bridegrooms in those days. Each age has added its particular bit of ritual until today… it is an artistic and solemn ceremonial.– Los Angeles Herald, 1922

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