The Old Farmer's Wedding chickens

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com
8 August 2013

The Old Farmer’s Wedding Chickens

According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac (now available to old farmers on the Orwellian telescreen), wedding showers are pretty much a Canadian and USA-ian custom dating back only a hundred years or so.  The bride is showered (metaphorically, one hopes) with useful household gifts and good wishes for her coming wedding by her friends, and the men mostly stay away.

Y’r ‘umble scrivener hovered on the periphery of a wedding shower recently, but after moving boxes and buying some ice, all under careful supervision, he was able to escape.   There’s just something about wedding showers that makes men nervous.

An unfortunate fashion in violating the sacred No Boys Allowed rule came to pass in the odious 80s, but common sense has since prevailed.  Men participate in wedding showers only to the extent of lifting heavy boxes and moving them around.  If the men have been very, very good in carrying things, they are permitted to peek briefly in on the decorations and admire them before being dismissed to wallow in coarse guy-ness in the outer darkness.

As the reader knows, men grieve in profound sorrow that they are not permitted to “Ooooooooooooh!” and “Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” at bath towels and coffee makers while squirming in church-hall chairs and nibbling finger sandwiches.

The concept of the wedding registry has now been programmed into the Orwellesphere, and friends of the bride – the groom hardly counts – can key in the nuclear codes and see what the bride wants, complete with colors, sizes, and purity of green organic origins.

In the not-so-distant past, wedding gifts were more immediately utilitarian, as depicted in Fiddler on the Roof: at the reception, among other presents, one friend gives Tzeitel and Motel a couple of chickens.  How easy to dismiss the domestic fowls as quaint and folksy, but in thin times those two chickens were significant because they were food and in context quite expensive.  Through World War II here and anywhere, a couple of chickens would have been a great wedding gift.

Old photographs show that wedding showers now are much as they were in Ye Olden Times When We Were Poor But We Had Love, and so on: worthy matrons and giddy youth dress in their best and gather in the parish hall to celebrate life’s transitions.  In ancient Rome and Lydia and Ethiopia women might not have called such jollifications showers, but they gathered, as they do now and will forever, to celebrate the ancient rituals, both spiritual and secular, of life’s transitions.  And, yes, the men were required to disappear lest they profane the events.

Wedding showers are a way of saying that civilization continues.

One does not imagine, however, the modern bride programming “two chickens” into her electronic wedding registry.

-30-