Sunday, July 27, 2014

My big fat German wedding

What is a German wedding like?

We wrote about the traditional ceramics and porcelain smashing event "Polterabend" and its much less stressful modern incarnation, we gave you a couple of bachelor/bachelorette party insights.

The wedding itself? Most of the standard bits and pieces are familiar enough, bride & groom (soon probably bride & bride and groom & groom), wedding bands, the various maids, flowers, cakes, foodstuffs, presents, music and what have you.

Any old gas station has the current issue of Wedding Style magazine -- note yet another another easily understandable German publication title "Wedding Style" -- as well as a few web sites like http://www.weddingstyle.de.

According to these publications, "traditional marriage", defined as 1 man & 1 woman & one wedding registry, is alive and well. 

The wedding we were lucky to get invited to was so much more fun. A barn as the setting of a wedding party is rare these days in rural Germany. The family had done all the work, starting with the easy job of driving a monster combine out of the barn all the way to rigging speakers to the rafters 15 feet up.

Cakes, including the wedding cake, as well as salads were contributed potluck style, the meat was as local as it gets, from the butcher down the street. Bread and rolls from a baker one town over, sun flowers from the garden just yards behind the barn, wild flowers on the tables, a huge friendly dog roaming the grounds, an appropriately disinterest-feigning cat completed the picture.

After this zero drama wedding, we are not sure if we'll ever accept an invitation to a Frankfurt banker wedding.

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