When it comes to getting married….

Yesterday I wrote about my daughters upcoming wedding, and how I thought that we had failed to teach our kids to act responsibly and live within their means when it comes to such things as marriages or proms or even buying cars.

As excessive as we Americans have become, we really don’t hold a candle to how its done in some parts of the world.

The practice of dowry is as old as mankind, where usually the bride needs to bring great wealth to the marriage in order for it to happen at all. Dowry is why to this day girl babies are not all that welcome in parts of India and China and other developing nations. It is too expensive to get them married off and out of the house.

In some cultures, the dowry that the bride brought belonged to the husband. In others, it remained the property of the bride, but could be administered by the husband. In other times, if the wife died without sons, the husband had to repay all or part of the dowry.

Even the custom of christmas stockings stems from a practice where providing dowry for poor women was regarded as an act of charity by wealthy parishioners. St Nicholas supposedly threw gold into the stockings of three sisters, thus, providing their dowries.

I suppose it has been a burden of fathers around the world  to ensure that their daughters were properly married off, and that they took with them sufficient dowry so that the family was not shamed.

In much of Europe and even in early America, girls began filling their hope chests at a very early age. Into this chest would go linens and blankets, usually from the girls own needlework efforts. This was a common practice, right up into the 1950’s, when apparently it became more fashionable for dear old Dad to bust out the wallet and head to the nearest department store.

Dowry was much less common in societies that practiced polygamy. I suppose when every man had several wives, fathers of daughters didn’t have to worry quite so much about being stuck with a house full of old maids, and were more reluctant to fork over substantial portions of the family treasury to get the daughters out of the house.

India is a country where the dowry was an integral part of the culture, and still is, even though there are laws on the books since 1961 prohibiting the practice. One statistic I read states that upwards of 9,000 women a year are killed in India over dowry.

Many latin american cultures still practice the Quinceañera or fiesta de quiñce. When a girl reaches their 15th year, a grand party is held, similar in many respects to what we see at modern American wedding receptions. Lots of music and dancing and some traditional rituals involving ribbons or rings.  It isn’t unheard of for families to spend tens of thousands of dollars on these fiestas for their teenage daughters, all in the name of keeping up their social standings.

A recent news article suggests that even the common Senior Prom is now an event that can set a parent back a thousand bucks or more per teen. I would think that parents of twins or triplets would be going into heart failure.

Imagine if you are a Latin American with triplet daughters? By the time you paid for the Quinceañera, the proms and then the weddings, you and your wife would be in the poorhouse.

I suppose that these traditions are necessary. They make us civilized, and are merely modern versions of rituals that we have practiced ever since we did them by firelight, with our shadows dancing across the cave walls.

It doesn’t make it any less painful when you are left at the end of the driveway, waving to the receding figures of your daughter and her new husband, clutching your empty wallet in one hand, and the credit card bill in the other.