Norwegian Wedding Spoons

When you get married, you bank, as my generation says. To an older generation who has no idea what that ridiculous word means in this context, it means you get lots and lots and lots of gifts. And cash. I imagine that the degree to which you bank depends heavily upon the socioeconomic levels of the peers your parents hang with. So yeah, we banked.

At times it was so humbling to see people being so nice. At other times, I felt bad by how much stuff I was getting that I really didn’t need. One of the most special gifts we received though isn’t something you can buy in a store. My eighth grade English teacher, who I hadn’t really kept up with from 9th grade through 5th year of college, happened to belong to the church where I started going, and where my girlfriend/fiancé/wife joined me not long after we met. He’s quite the whittler. When I finished eighth grade, he gave a bunch of people in the class Easter Island type faces, carved out of wood.

At one of our wedding showers, he gave us these Norwegian wedding spoons. It’s a solid piece of wood that he carved with two spoons on either end, and a linked chain in the middle. Each spoon has the first letter of our names on it.

(Click the smaller pictures for a bigger image.)

He included with the spoons the following note.

Spoons seem to be a symbol for love and the home the world over. There are examples of spoons as love tokens from societies throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia. Some are quite plain and others are extremely decorative. These spoons are the Norwegian Wedding Spoons.

Supposedly, when a young man went to court a young lady, he and she would desire some private time together. In the northern latitudes it was much too cold to be wandering about outside in the wintertime, so an unwarmed room was provided for the young people to use in their get acquainted mode. The father of the girl, aware of the possibilities of the situation, would require that the suitor show that he kept his hands busy at some task other than fondling the girl. By requiring a certain amount of work done by theend of each visit, the father was able to somewhat monitor the two young people.

Tradition was that the suitor made the spoons for the young lady, and at the wedding the bride and groom gave each other a bite of the wedding cake using the spoons. The spoons were then hung over the door of their new home. Some say that the wife wore them around her neck when her husband was away from home.

Because of commercialism the tradition died out almost two hundred years ago. I hope these spoons will be for you a symbol of life together and a memory that begins a lifetime of happiness.

What does this have to do with science or faith? Hmmmm. Nothing?

Just thought it was too cool not to share.