Wedding Traditions and Customs

Honeymoon or Honeymead. It's Pretty Sweet!

The Babylonians swear they were drinking mead when the rest of the world hadn’t even been discovered. Both the Greeks and the Romans deny such a possibility. And the Irish state, unequivocally, before the Irish Mead, there was no mead. Say, what you will, though, mead has always been part of the wedding tradition.

There is the story, totally unprovable as most of these stories are, that part of the deal of taking his daughter off his hands, the Babylonian groom expected his dad-in-law, to provide him with mead for a month after his marriage. Don’t ask me why a father would do that, but there you go.

What seems uncontroversial, however, is that mead had wonderful properties, even though it affected different people in different ways.

There is that old story, originating thousands of years ago, when Cleisthenes was trying to marry off his daughter to the most talented young Turk around. So, at a feast of notables – minus the young woman, fortunately - the two favoured suitors, Megacles and Hippocleides, were given their heads to impress Cleisthenes with their talents.

Hippocleides, knowing he was the favored contender, really let himself go. First, he showed off his musical abilities by playing the flute. Then he sang a few ditties. And then, to round off the night, he began to dance. There was no doubt, that as far as the girl’s father was concerned, Hippocleides was the one.

Unfortunately, all this activity was a thirsty work, and as he loved his mead, as the night wore on, he became more and more merry, and would you believe, he reached the stage where the ordinary dancing would just not do. So, like the rap dancers of today, he jumped on the table, did a few tap steps, then with his head on the table, started kicking his legs in the air.

Now this was extraordinarily talented and everyone would have found much to admire in these antics, except for one thing. Those were the days when men didn’t wear trousers, just little tunics with very little – if anything - underneath. So, in the end, mead was his undoing, and the girl ended up with second best.

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