Bride-to-be Blogger Alyse: My Wedding-Day Superstitions

Martin Poole

This week, I learned something very disturbing: It is unlucky to get married in a leap year.

Now, I wouldn’t call myself superstitious—except for the fact that I totally am. I am the person that needs to eat “lucky” foods on New Years Day, makes an effort to say “rabbit rabbit” to myself on the first of the month and gets legitimately excited when I catch the clock at 11:11 so that I can make a wish.

This leap year thing isn’t the first time I thought that 2012 might have some sort of bad omen to it (putting the obvious end-of-the-world thing aside for now). Having memorized the calendar, I realized that there are three (3!) Friday the Thirteenths in 2012: January, April and July. That’s at six months to go, three months to go, and the month of the wedding. It’s like a countdown of bad-luck doom.

I think the best thing to do to combat all of this bad luck is to not ignore any of the good-luck wedding traditions. The most obvious is “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, and Something Blue.” For something old, I am going the sentimental route and attaching a necklace Kevin gave me for my 18th birthday to my bouquet. For Something New, well, that’s pretty much everything, no issues there. I am struggling with Something Borrowed, but am confident something will turn up if I do enough digging through jewelry boxes. And I am keeping the Something Blue a surprise for now.

There are plenty of other anti-bad luck traditions that I am also going to incorporate, like wearing a veil, being carried through the door by the groom and entering and exiting through the same pathway. I am also going to sew a piece of lace from my grandmother’s wedding gown to the inside of my dress (lace is apparently lucky and my dress has none).

At one point, I thought maybe we would do a “first look” and see each other for pictures before the ceremony, but when I told Kevin this he gave me a horrified look and said, “Isn’t that bad luck? I do not want to take any chances!” I also toyed with the idea of not having a cake, because Kevin and I don’t like cake, but apparently some people think it is bad luck to not have a bite of the wedding cake. So there will be cake. And we will eat it. No chances.

Are you superstitious like me? Are you incorporating any traditions into your wedding day because you are afraid of bad luck?

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