I dunno. Sometimes I get a little weary of thinking about the wedding in a measured, mature kind of way. Yes, yes, we are getting married, this is very serious introspective business. I know this. But sometimes I just wanna flip out, run around in circles shrieking with glee, shout “HOLY FUCKING SHIT I’M GETTING MARRIED WOOOO!!!!” at utter strangers from the window of a moving car. You feel me?

No? You never get that urge? Oh.

So in the spirit of shenanigans and revelry, I want to talk about wedding traditions. Yeah, traditions. ‘Round these parts we mostly talk about bucking tradition, but not this time. Because guess what I recently remembered: traditions can be light, fluffy, joyous, and somewhat insane.*

My favorite wedding tradition stems from my family, but it was not limited to my family. See, my great-grandparents owned a bar in rural Michigan called Cedar Grove. It didn’t matter who you were, if you got married in the middle of the thumb** of Michigan sometime between the 1950s and the 1980s, the first stop you made after the church thing was over with — on the way to the reception, of course — was Cedar Grove. As my mom put it, “It’s just what you did.”

My great-grandparents sold the bar in the 1970s, but it’s still there, and it’s still called Cedar Grove. We stopped in one Christmas a couple years ago, my extended family and I, for a few drinks, and we got to digging through their photographs. There are a few shoe and cigar boxes they keep behind the counter, and they are jammed full of yellowed photographs taken of bar patrons over the years.

I was sipping whiskey, digging around in a dirty old smoky box that contained a few generations’ worth of shadowy and out-of-focus bar antics. My youngest aunt, the one who stayed in Michigan, was keeping up a running commentary, murmuring over my shoulder — “Oh, she looks like a Wisniewski, that’s Dougie Wisniewski’s daughter” — when I suddenly came across some people I recognized.

Cedar Grove, 1976

That’s my aunt Terry on her wedding day in 1976. That’s my mom to the far left. Yet another aunt has her back to the camera.

From there they started stacking up. I found pictures taken at Cedar Grove from all of my aunts’ weddings, and from my parents’ own wedding. Sometimes my family members would show up in other weddings. Sometimes they even showed up in civilian clothes, clad in casual bellbottoms and polyester, just another night out with a beer.***

There’s no way the beau and I can keep up this particular tradition, of course. Cedar Grove is just about 2,500 miles too far away. But damn. Damn. I so wish we could.

Are there any traditions you can’t wait to keep?

Cedar Grove, 2007

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* Mmm, marshmallows. Oh wait, weddings? Or marshmallows? Mmm, marshmallows.

** Fast fact: Michiganders actually refer to the “thumb” on the “mitten” of Michigan as “The Thumb.”

*** My family members are, apparently, drunkards.