Etiquette - Emily Post (english novels for students TXT) 📗

The Most Elaborate Wedding Possible

This is the huge wedding of the daughter of ultra rich and prominent people in a city such as New York, or, more probably, a high-noon wedding out of town. The details would in either case he the same, except that the "country setting" makes necessary the additional provision of a special train which takes the guests to a station where they are met by dozens of motors and driven to the church. Later they are driven to the house, and later again, to the returning special train.

Otherwise, whether in the city or the country, the church (if Protestant) is decorated with masses of flowers in some such elaborateness as standards, or arches, or hanging garlands in the church itself, as well as the floral embellishment of the chancel. The service is conducted by a bishop or other distinguished clergyman, with assistant clergymen, and accompanied by a full choral service, possibly with the addition of a celebrated opera soloist. The costumes of the bride and her maids are chosen with painstaking attention to perfection, and with seeming disregard of cost.

Later, at the house, there is not only a floral bower under which the bridal couple receive, but every room has been turned into a veritable woodland or garden, so massed are the plants and flowers. An orchestra—or two, so that the playing may be without intermission—is hidden behind palms in the hall or wherever is most convenient. A huge canopied platform is built on the lawn or added to the veranda (or built out over the yard of a city house), and is decorated to look like an enclosed formal garden. It is packed with small tables, each seating four, six, or eight, as the occasion may require.

The Average Fashionable Wedding

The more usual fashionable wedding is merely a modification of the one outlined above. The chancel of the church is decorated exactly the same, but except in summer when garden flowers are used, there is very little attempted in the body of the church other than sprays of flowers at the ends of the ten to twenty reserved pews, or possibly only at the ends of the first two pews and the two that mark the beginning of the ribboned section. There is often a choral service and a distinguished officiating clergyman. The costumes of bride and bridesmaids are usually the same in effect, though they may be less lavish in detail.

The real difference begins at the breakfast, where probably a hundred guests are invited, or two hundred at most, instead of from five hundred to a thousand, and except for the canopied background against which the bride and groom receive, there is very little floral decoration of the house. If a tent is built, it is left as it is—a tent—with perhaps some standard trees at intervals to give it a decorated appearance. The tables, even that of the bride, their garniture, the service, and the food are all precisely the same, the difference being in the smaller number of guests provided for.

A Small Wedding

A small wedding is merely a further modification of the two preceding ones. Let us suppose it is a house wedding in a moderate-sized house.

A prayer bench has been placed at the end of the drawing-room or living-room. Back of it is a screen or bower of palms or other greens. One decoration thus serves for chancel and background at the reception. A number of small tables in the dining-room may seat perhaps twenty or even fifty guests, besides the bride's table placed in another room. If the bride has no attendants, she and the groom choose a few close friends to sit at the table with them. Or, at a smaller wedding, there is a private marriage in a little chapel, or the clergyman reads the service at the house of the bride in the presence of her parents and his and a small handful of guests, who all sit down afterwards at one table for a wedding breakfast.

Or there may be a greater number of guests and a simpler collation, such as a stand-up afternoon tea, where the refreshments are sandwiches, cakes, tea and chocolate.

Breach Of Etiquette For Groom To Give Wedding

No matter whether a wedding is to be large or tiny, there is one unalterable rule: the reception must be either at the house of the bride's parents or grandparents or other relative of hers, or else in assembly rooms rented by her family. Never under any circumstances should a wedding reception be given at the house of the groom's family. They may give a ball or as many entertainments of whatever description they choose for the young couple after they are married, but the wedding breakfast and the trousseau of the bride must be furnished by her own side of the house!

When a poor girl marries, her wedding must be in keeping with the means of her parents. It is not only inadvisable for them to attempt expenditure beyond what they can afford, but they would lay themselves open to far greater criticism through inappropriate lavishness, than through meagerness of arrangement—which need not by any means lack charm because inexpensive.

Wedding Of A Cinderella

Some years ago there was a wedding when a girl who was poor married a man who was rich and who would gladly have given her anything she chose, the beauty of which will be remembered always by every witness in spite of, or maybe because of, its utter lack of costliness.

It was in June in the country. The invitations were by word of mouth to neighbors and personal notes to the groom's relatives at a distance. The village church was decorated by the bride, her younger sisters, and some neighbors, with dogwood, than which nothing is more bridelike or beautiful. The shabbiness of her father's little cottage was smothered with flowers and branches cut in a neighboring wood. Her dress, made by herself, was of tarlatan covered with a layer or two of tulle, and her veil was of tulle fastened with a spray, as was her girdle, of natural bridal wreath and laurel leaves. Her bouquet was of trailing bridal wreath and white lilacs. She was very young, and divinely beautiful, and fresh and sweet. The tulle for her dress and veil and her thin silk stockings and white satin slippers represented the entire outlay of any importance for her costume. A little sister in smock of pink sateen and a wreath and tight bouquet of pink laurel clusters, toddled after her and "held" her bouquet—after first laying her own on the floor!

The collation was as simple as the dresses of the bride and bridesmaid. A home-made wedding cake, "professionally" iced and big enough for every one to take home a thick slice in waxed paper piled near for the purpose, and a white wine cup, were the most "pretentious" offerings. Otherwise there were sandwiches, hot biscuits, cocoa, tea and coffee, scrambled eggs and bacon, ice cream and cookies, and the "music" was a victrola, loaned for the occasion. The bride's "going away" dress was of brown Holland linen and her hat a plain little affair as simple as her dress; again her only expenditure was on shoes, stockings and gloves. Later on, she had all the clothes that money could buy, but in none of them was she ever more lovely than in her fashionless wedding dress of tarlatan and tulle, and the plain little frock in which she drove away. Nor are any of the big parties that she gives to-day more enjoyable, though perfect in their way, than her wedding on a June day, a number of years ago.

The Wedding Hour

The fashionable wedding hour in New York is either noon, or else in the afternoon at three, three-thirty or four o'clock, with the reception always a half hour later. High noon, which means that the breakfast is at one o'clock, and four o'clock in the afternoon, with the reception at half after, are the conventional hours.

The Evening Wedding

In San Francisco and generally throughout the West altogether smart weddings are celebrated at nine o'clock in the evening. The details are precisely the same as those of morning or afternoon. The bride and bridesmaids wear dresses that are perhaps more elaborate and "evening" in model, and the bridegroom as well as all men present wear evening clothes, of course. If the ceremony is in a church, the women should wear wraps and an ornament or light scarf of some sort over their hair, as ball dresses are certainly not suitable, besides which church regulations forbid the uncovering of women's heads in consecrated places of worship.

The Morning Wedding

To some, nine o'clock in the morning may sound rather eccentric for a wedding, but to people of the Atlantic Coast it is not a bit more so than an evening hour—less so, if anything, because morning is unconventional anyway and etiquette, never being very strong at that hour, is not defied, but merely left quiescent.

If, for any reason, such as taking an early morning train or ship—an early morning wedding might be a good suggestion. The bride should, of course, not wear satin and lace; she could wear organdie (let us hope the nine o'clock wedding is in summer!), or she could wear very simple white crêpe de chine. Her attendants could wear the simplest sort of morning dresses with garden hats; the groom a sack suit or flannels. And the breakfast—really breakfast—could consist of scrambled eggs and bacon and toast and coffee—and griddle cakes!

The above is not written in ridicule; the hour would be "unusual," but a simple early morning wedding where every one is dressed in morning clothes, and where the breakfast suggests the first meal of the day—could be perfectly adorable! The evening wedding on the other hand, lays itself open to criticism because it is a function—a function is formal, and the formal is always strictly in the province of that austere and inflexible lawmaker, Etiquette. And Etiquette at this moment says: "Weddings on the Atlantic seaboard are celebrated not later than four-thirty o'clock in the afternoon!"

Wedding Presents

And now let us return to the more particular details of the wedding of our especial bride.

The invitations are mailed about three weeks before the wedding. As soon as they are out, the presents to the bride begin coming in, and she should enter each one carefully in her gift book. There are many published for the purpose, but an ordinary blank book, nicely bound, as she will probably want to keep it, about eight to ten inches square, will answer every purpose. The usual model spreads across the double page, as follows: