Tradition or tacky

I don’t know how I came to this, but I found myself looking up the dollar dance on Wikipedia. I’m quite familiar with the dollar dance, so I don’t know how or why I felt the need to look it up, but there I was. It mentions that it’s a German/polish tradition which makes perfect sense to me. The city where I grew up (Erie, PA) has a lot of Germans and Poles and I remember quite a few of these dollar dances as a snot nosed kid running around the reception hall in the Elk’s club.

What got me upset in the Wikipedia article is that it mentioned it as a “lower socio-economic” tradition. Really? You had to play the poor card? Just because you give the couple some spending money for their honeymoon doesn’t mean they’re poor. Those weddings I went to as a kid seemed pretty posh, but that may be the rosy outlook of a 6 year old. So I decided to take out the “socio-economic” statement, because there was no relevant citation (The source the sited was a blog about Mexican Weddings. Nice little stereotype) and frankly, it pissed me off.

I did some more surfing and found two camps in “Dollar Dance-land”. Camp one was shocked and appalled at this “pimping” of the bride. Their reasoning was that as guests, they brought a gift, there was no need to be extorted for “face time” with the bride. Camp two clung to the argument of tradition and was desperately defending it from the epithets of “trashy” and “tacky”. Cries of “It’s only a dollar” and “It’s to help them pay for the honeymoon” were oft repeated. When I was shooting weddings in VA, I only saw the dollar dance once, and that couple was from the Boston area. The photographer I was shooting with (an uptight wasp of a woman) was appalled beyond belief, while I was happily tripping down memory lane.

Its got to be the money aspect that puts people off. I think if people were paying the bride in sticks of gum or brownies, we’d avoid all the brew-ha-ha. Maybe with all of the great new technology, instead of handing the best man a dollar, you can to go the couples blog, find out where they are staying for their honeymoon and send a credit to their hotel for room service, or send them a fruit basket to their room for when they arrive. Maybe that would make some of these prudes feel better.