Most brides and grooms want their wedding ceremony and reception to reflect their own personalities along with their traditional cultural background and beliefs. When the merging of two cultures has crossed traditional lines a wedding couple may well want to introduce elements of both their cultures into their wedding.
Finding your personal wedding style is a matter of deciding the type of ceremony most suited to you and of getting a sense of which rituals, blessings, prayers, readings, and religious or cultural traditions are personally meaningful. Incorporating cultural traditions and customs into a wedding is a great way to share something personal with your guests and to pay tribute to your families.
An Australian wedding ceremony may feature a unity bowl. Each guest is a given stone and asked to hold it during the ceremony. At the end of the ceremony, guests place their stone in a decorative bowl that the wedding couple will keep and display afterwards to remind them of the love and support of friends and family present.
French weddings often serve a croquembouche – a tower of cream-filled and caramel-drizzled choux pastry buns – as the wedding cake. When it’s time to present the croquembouche, the lights will go down, and the DJ will start the guests chanting, “Le gateau! Le gateau!” The croquembouche is usually presented spiked with lit sparklers. After the sparks die down, the couple each breaks off a choux and feeds it to the other. The tower is then whisked away to be cut, plated and served to guests as dessert.
In visually stunning tradition Indian weddings brides and other female attendees are often dyed with intricate henna designs to represent the joy, hope, and love of the occasion. On the day of the wedding, in a ritual called “Joota Chupai,” an Indian bride’s sisters and female cousins will make off with the groom’s shoes and demand that a ransom is paid for their safe return.
The night before an Italian wedding, the groom may traditionally throw a surprise party outside his bride-to-be’s window. “La serenata” begins with the groom, backed by musicians, serenading his fiancée. This turns into a full-blown party, complete with a lavish buffet and all the couple’s friends and family.
A Welsh bride carries a bouquet that must include myrtle – a flowering herb that symbolizes love. The bride will give a myrtle cutting to each of her bridesmaids. The theory is that if a bridesmaid plants the myrtle cutting and it blooms, she’ll be the next bride. The Welsh believe that it is great to get married on the last day of the year.
In Peruvian weddings, the wedding cake is typically adorned with ribbons each attached to a charm, one of which is a fake wedding ring. During the reception, all the single women at the wedding take part in the “cake pull,” each grabbing a ribbon. The single lady who lands up with the fake wedding ring is believed to be the next to get married.
This is just a glimpse into a handful of cultural wedding traditions from around the world, there are many more!
As a luxury boutique hotel Hout Bay Manor is more than just an ordinary Cape Town wedding venue, renowned for accommodating a wide array of personal wedding needs. You can choose our glamorous and more formal indoor setting offering seating for 40 – 100 guests, or we can cater for up to 150 guests at a cocktail-styled celebration. Hout Bay Manor offers seventeen en-suite rooms, each beautifully furnished and decorated, with many thoughtful added touches – ideal to accommodate your out of town wedding guests or even an entire wedding party from abroad.
Baviaanskloof, Off Main Road,
Hout Bay, 7872
Cape Town, South Africa
Tel number: + 27 21 790 0116
Email: reservations@houtbaymanor.co.za
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