Traditions Before the Marriage Ceremony

The traditional hope chest or bridal trousseau, began in France and came from the French word trousse, meaning bundle.

The popularity of a bride wearing a white wedding gown on her wedding day, began in France several hundred years ago. The custom of having fragrant flowers as decorations and bridal bouquets has also been popular for centuries. Each flower represents a unique and special meaning to the bride and groom, and especially fragrant flowers helped freshen things up a bit, before deodorant and perfumes were invented.

Wedding bells in France were usually heard in spring and summer when it was warm enough for everyone to bathe!

Still practiced in small villages today, is a traditional French custom, for the groom to call on his future bride at her home on the wedding day morning. As he escorts her to the wedding chappel, the town's children stretch white ribbons across the road, which the bride cuts. Traditionally the groom usually walks his mother down the aisle just prior to the main wedding procession.

As the newlywed couple departs from the wedding site, laurel leaves are scattered in their path for them to walk over.

Wedding Invitations

A typical French wedding lasts all day and into the next day. It starts with a civil ceremony at City Hall in the morning, and is followed by a religious ceremony, then a small cockatail reception (a vin d'honneur), followed by a 4 or 5-course meal, and then dancing. The dancing often starts between dinner courses, in order to give guests a chance to work up more of an appetite. Typically a French wedding doesn’t end until 3:00 or 4:00AM, or even later.

A guest in France can be invited to all, or only part of the wedding festivities - even JUST dessert around midnight, and what is more is that they will not get offended by it! If you were to receive an invitation to a French wedding, it would probably say that you have been invited to the civil ceremony, the church ceremony, and the vin d’honneur immediately following the church ceremony in a small room at the church. In a typical French ceremony, pretty much everyone is invited to all of this. However if you are worthy, you will also receive have another card inserted into your invitation that says something like you have been invited to the dinner, with dancing to follow. Hooray. Alternatively, you could receive a card that says that you have only been invited for dessert. Wipe-out.

The reasoning behind this is that everyone gets to participate in the couples joyous day, and the french family is not left with the financial burden of feeding their entire arrondissement.

French Wedding Reception

A wedding toast is made to the newlyweds sometime during the traditional French wedding reception. Following this toast, they drink, as husband and wife, from a specially engraved, double handled goblet, usually a precious family heirloom passed down from generation to generation.

After the wedding reception, and even later into the couple's wedding night, friends of the newlyweds might show up outside their window banging pots and pans, singing boisterous tunes. The groom is expected to invite them in for drinks and snacks.

Destination weddings are now incredibly popular. Now you can get married in a wedding chateau and have a fairytale chateau wedding. Why get married at home when you could have a romantic castle wedding and a holiday with your closest friends and families for less than it would cost to get hitched at home.