20 Honeymoon Customs That Were Nothing Like A Romantic Getaway

The domum deductio was a Roman wedding procession in which a new bride was escorted to her husband’s house for the first time. According to Roman religion, lares and penates, spirits that were thought to guard the household, were often located at the threshold of a doorway, so if the bride stumbled when she crossed it, it was considered an ill omen that the marriage might be barren or unlucky. The solution? The groom just picked her up and carried her in. This custom was already practiced by the eighth century BCE.

Drinking honey mead for a month after the wedding was also practiced by ancient Germanic tribes, Norse peoples, and medieval European communities. A couple’s families would leave a month’s worth of mead for the newlyweds. The newlyweds would consume this sweet drink daily for a month (one lunar cycle), as doing so was thought to promote fertility and perpetuate the family line. This tradition took place in their home, not during a vacation or “moon” trip. While this is an actual custom that existed in folk culture, we don’t know if the term “honeymoon” originated from this practice.

In the 19th-century American South, laws prevented enslaved African Americans from entering into marriage contracts, so ceremonies concluded with another sort of promise. A broom was placed on the floor, and the couple clasped hands and leapt over it, sweeping off their old, unmarried selves to make way for new, married ones. The custom of jumping over a broomstick also occurred in 18th-century British and Romani folk weddings, independent of its meaning in the enslaved South.

After dinner in medieval and early modern Europe, guests, family, and a priest would escort the bride and groom to their bedroom. Women removed the bride’s clothes, men took off the groom’s, and the priest sprinkled holy water over the couple. For royal and noble weddings, witnesses were sometimes asked to stay behind and verify that the couple had consummated their union because land contracts and peace treaties relied on the marriage being complete. Regular people simply had the curtains drawn as the guests continued the party outside.

Even after a 17th- or 18th-century British couple had been placed in bed, their wedding night still wasn’t over. Any unmarried guests would pull the bride’s and groom’s stockings off and play “Flinging the Stocking,” where single men would throw the bride’s stockings backwards over their shoulders, and single women would throw the groom’s stockings at the newlywed couple’s heads. Samuel Pepys documented the wedding activity in his diary in February 1663. If you hit them in the face, you were supposedly next in line to marry.

In rural parts of France, most notably in the Auvergne region, unmarried wedding guests would gather early the next morning to stake out the newlyweds for a tradition called La Rôtie. A chamber pot, made to resemble excrement as a prank, was brought with melted chocolate, champagne, and bananas to the bedchamber of the couple. The newlyweds would drink from the pot before passing it around to the unwed guests, signifying that they were now fully adults.

In July 1801, U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr’s daughter, Theodosia Burr Alston, went to Niagara Falls with her new husband, Joseph Alston. Three years later, Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother Jérôme and his wife Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte also visited the site. Niagara then had neither paved roads nor hotels, so getting there required several weeks in a stagecoach or on a pack horse. Both couples successfully reached Niagara, and their journeys contributed to making the falls a classic honeymoon destination.

Charivari began in medieval France and arrived in North America as shivaree, continuing from the 17th through early 20th centuries. Groups of local young people and neighbors would show up at a newlywed couple’s window during the night hours, banging on pots, blowing horns, and firing off guns. The noise continued until the groom came out to offer food, drinks, or money. It also served as a form of public censure for marriages that did not conform to community standards.

The morning after the wedding, villagers would load a heavy wicker basket called a creel with stones, tie it onto the groom’s back, and make him walk around the village. He couldn’t lift it himself. Only his wife could relieve him by running outside to unfasten the straps and kiss him in full view of all onlookers. This tradition, called the creeling ceremony, tested the groom’s ability to support his family and the wife’s commitment to him.

Between the 1800s and the 1890s, newlyweds from the US took trips to spa towns including Saratoga Springs and Ballston Spa in New York to “take the waters.” The carbonated mineral springs were prescribed by doctors to cure “digestive trouble” and “female weaknesses,” and were said to increase fertility. Couples observed rigorous daily schedules of drinking set amounts at set times, scooped up by attendants known as dipper boys, before taking supervised mineral baths. This wasn’t a holiday, but a course of medical treatment.

As far back as the 17th century, men in Wales would prove their skill and commitment by hand-carving one piece of wood into a lovespoon to present to their new bride. The oldest extant, dated lovespoon was made in 1667. Once married, the spoons were hung on the wall of the newlyweds’ home, with each symbol representing something meaningful: carved chains represented togetherness, keys represented a safe home, and caged balls represented hoped-for children.

In rural Scotland, prior to entering the bridal chamber, a groom was expected to perch atop a tub of water. His friends and relatives would then wash his feet. Those mischievous enough to do so would daub the groom’s legs and feet with chimney soot, coal dust, or even ashes, while he scrubbed to get himself clean again. And at the bottom of the tub, guests would dig for a wedding ring that someone had secretly dropped there, since the finder would be believed to be the next to wed.

A freshly married couple sitting in their marriage bed in Tudor and Stuart England would be brought a drink called Benediction Posset: hot milk curdled with ale or sack wine, and flavored with sugar, eggs, nutmeg, and cinnamon, then poured from a two-handled pot. The couple’s family and local clergy would surround the bed while a priest blessed the drink, which they would then share in order to regain their strength after their wedding feast and ensure that they conceived.

At some elite Roman weddings, known as confarreatio, the groom broke a barley cake over the bride’s head before leaving for the reception. The guests ate the crumbs, thinking that it transferred her fertility to them, hence their future families. A similar tradition took place in Scotland, where shortbread was broken over the bride’s head. In addition, guests throughout Rome and medieval Europe threw raw grain, wheat, barley, or oats, at the departing couple. Since these grains represented fertility and life, the couple was wished a harvest and many children.

According to Anglo-Saxon tradition, the bride’s father gave one of her shoes to the groom, who tapped her heel in the process to signify that the wife had been transferred from one man’s control to another. From the Anglo-Saxons to the Victorians, wedding guests threw old boots at the departing carriage, thinking they would receive good fortune and fertility if the boot connected with the vehicle. The Victorians took a shortcut by tying the boots to the carriage axle, the precursor to the practice of tying a can to a car’s bumper.

It was tradition among American pioneers in the 18th and 19th centuries that after newlyweds mounted their horses or stepped up into a wagon to head off to their new cabin, guests would fire their rifles and shotguns into the air. Frontier families thought that loud noises would ward off any malevolent spirits on the road ahead, not yet paved, but also let all nearby cabins know of a new family unit.

In ancient Rome, when a patrician girl wed, she remained indoors behind closed doors for a few days, wearing a flame-yellow veil over her head and body, known as the flammeum, without leaving the house or exposing her visage to strangers as she shifted from her father’s household gods to those of her husband. This was not to provide her with privacy, but rather because the Romans felt that women in their first days of marriage were more vulnerable to the evil eye, and the veil and the seclusion protected her from it.

In Scotland and Appalachia in the 18th and 19th centuries, the day after the wedding brought no rest either. The couple also went to the groom’s parents’ house for the Infare, also known as the Second-Day Dinner. At this time, the groom’s family received the bride into their home and family. The entire community came to the meal and danced and played fiddle music. It wasn’t until this point that she was officially part of her husband’s family tree.

From the 1820s to the 1880s, upper-class newlywed couples in Britain and continental Europe began taking a honeymoon, or voyage à la façon anglaise, as it was called in France. The pair did not stop to rest but journeyed from town to town, where they made formal presentations of the bride to her relatives and friends who could not attend the ceremony. According to social etiquette of the time, a young wife could not travel by herself with her husband. Therefore, she was accompanied by a chaperone, usually her mother or an unmarried sister.

Prior to the 1840s, only affluent couples could afford post-wedding trips, departing in private horse-drawn carriages. Steam railways were expanding across Britain and North America between the 1840s and 1900, and certain routes came to be known as “Honeymoon Expresses,” bringing post-wedding travel to middle-class couples as well. Still, honeymooners were confined to open passenger cars surrounded by strangers, subject to a set schedule, and traveling through thronging railroad terminals. It was less expensive, but not yet private.

This content was created with the help of AI.