North Passage: Northeast Wedding Traditions

I actually just started yesterday to write about something completely different. Last night at my choir rehearsal, my friend Valerie shared a funny story with me that I just had to share with her.

Valerie is a retired school teacher who sits next to me at chorus practice. She has the most delightful cooking personality and always has something interesting to share. Last night we were discussing the difference between an American cake and an English cake, and it got her talking about traditional weddings where she's from. (In case you're wondering, a traditional English cake is not a sponge cake like an American cake, but a fruit cake with a strong fondant or marzipan frosting. Wedding cakes are still made with fruitcake today.)

Valerie grew up in Durham in a colliery, which was a community of miners, usually adjacent to a coal mine. They were a very close-knit community where everyone helped everyone else, and much of the North East was made up of coal mines until the mid-20th century. Valerie shared this fascinating story about a coal mine wedding and I will do my best to relate it to you. Beamish Museum 1913 Durham Coal Mine

Example. The mine can be seen in the background, with the coal mine dwellings on the far left and the church and other community buildings on the right.

Traditionally the wedding reception was held in the coal mine church hall. At a traditional coal mine wedding, the mother of the bride usually prepares all the food for all the guests, unlike most modern or more upscale weddings where the caterer usually prepares the food for the wedding. Not only does she do all the food, but the guest list for one of these events is usually around 200 to 300 people!

Because the mother of the bride cooks for 300 people, all the immediate neighbors pitch in and play the role of waitress. All the women of the neighborhood would put on their "best pinafore" or apron and serve the guests at the wedding. In addition, as church halls usually did not have their own crockery or cutlery, neighbors lent their own sets for the day. In those days everyone had similar cutlery, usually a bone handle with a metal utensil on top. To distinguish whose cutlery was whose, each neighbor would glue a piece of cotton of a different color to the handle of their cutlery so that at the end of the evening they could return the proper cutlery to its owner.

There usually wasn't enough seating in the church hall for everyone to eat there once, they would usually set up a couple of long tables and then the head of the neighboring waiters would tell the bride and groom's families to sit down and then they would eat their meal. After they finished eating, they would clean up the tables, re-set them, and then call their friends and neighbors for their turn to eat.

There was also a band, which consisted of an accordion, drums, and piano, and everyone danced.

It sounds like a delightful wedding, but it also sounds like something out of Little House on the Prairie. What strikes me most about this story is that Valerie was probably in her late 60s or early 70s, which is something that happened often in her lifetime. These kinds of weddings were the norm in this area until the mid-20th century! It seems like an interesting story from a couple of generations ago, when in fact it's a fairly recent practice.

There seem to be so many of these stories that I have a hard time placing them in the context of what has happened in the last 50 or 60 years. For example, in the last 30 years I've heard my husband talk about using the bathroom outdoors. Also, in the 70's, men in this town used to get tattoos with ink holes in their desks while they were in school. If you come to this town, you'll notice many men in their late 40s and early 50s who still have tattoos loosely on their hands and arms, and even on their faces, who tattooed themselves with ink holes in desks while they were in school

It's not that this is a backward town, and some of these old practices are just dying a hard death. While new technologies and trends have emerged and been put to use, the old ones seem to be decades away from being phased out.

Bringing it back to Valerie, she, of course, had to end her story about traditional weddings with a surprise. She added, "Look, I'm a bit of a snob, so I insisted on a 3-course, fork-and-knife meal for about 60 people," allowing Valerie to break the mold of traditional coal mine weddings and demand only the best!"