On this Christmas morning, I witnessed a trio of grandchildren waiting in eager anticipation to open some presents. They had to wait for their parents to awaken before they could unwrap their gifts. A similar feeling must have existed for a lot of couples who had to wait until after Christmas came before they could get married. It is not so pronounced anymore, but there was once a time when pastors would not allow weddings to take place during the penitential seasons of Lent and Advent. I find it amazing how many weddings took place on Christmas Day in the past. I did a search on our German Family Tree for “married 25 dec” which is the format Lynn Degenhardt used for marriage dates in his GFT. I ended up with 92 results. If you also figure that each record is listed in the GFT for both a bride and a groom, then you come up with about 46 marriages in that document that took place on Christmas Day. I did a search for some other random dates during the year to see what the average number of weddings to take place on another date that was not part of the Lent/Advent/Christmas seasons. That number was usually in the 20’s or 30’s. If you cut that in half, a more normal number of weddings on those dates was in the teens. Certainly not a number as high as 46. It is even more astounding when you search for weddings that took place the day after Christmas. That number of results is 135, which translates to be about 68 weddings. The number of results for December 27 weddings drops down to 80. Then the number is back to normal for December 28th marriages…31. 

One of these Christmas weddings was described in a previous post titled, Noel Nuptials. That post told of a display that we have in our museum which includes the wedding dress of the bride for that Christmas Day wedding.

Allow me to make some other observations about these holiday weddings.

• The days around Easter would also indicate a larger than usual amount of weddings. However, since the date for Easter varies from year to year, I am unable to do a search for the day after Easter in our GFT.
• In addition to brides and grooms being willing to get married on Christmas Day, it also required a Lutheran pastor who was willing to perform a wedding ceremony on Christmas Day. These ceremonies did not likely occur during a morning Christmas Day worship service, so they had to be married later in the day.
• Can you imagine how many husbands and wives would celebrate Christmas Day and their wedding anniversaries on the same day? One has to wonder how they may have handled that situation.
• Would there have been a lot of folks attending these Christmas Day weddings? Wouldn’t a lot of people have other family festivities on that day?

The next time you visit our museum, perhaps during this year’s Christmas Exhibit, make sure to view the case containing several clothing artifacts, including the Christmas Day wedding dress worn by a Christmas bride. However, you have to wait until at least tomorrow to visit because the museum is closed today.