Mundane Musings Conventional Unconvention

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 136, 30 August 1927, Page 5

Mundane Musings Conventional Unconvention

I have just been reading an article in a paper on the etiquette of weddings, and it ends with the words: “You needn’t lay out your presents to be inspected by your friends if you don’t want to do so; it is conventional these days to be unconventional.” I have no particular brief for the type of silly woman who will insist on sitting on the floor, and who wears sandals and smokes cigars, rather defiantly, because, “I’m so unconventional,” but I do think that the sweeping away of an enormous number of silly, outworn conventions is all to the good. The display of wedding presents, the point in question, is surely a barbarous custom which pleases no one. It annoys you to see that your gift of a set of cocktail glasses, for which you have received an effusive letter of thanks, has two rivals, both prettier and more impressive than the one you sent; it mortally wounds Aunt Jane, who thinks that her duchesse set has been poked away in a corner and not given sufficient prominence; it blights the feelings of the bride, who feels that her presents make rather a poor show after Effie’s which included a pearl necklace and a goldfitted dressing-bag, and lastly, it entails a great deal of unnecessary labour. Weddings have always been surrounded by an immense amount of stupid customs, from the convention that you must wear white, the most trying of colours, to the idea that the marriage was somehow unhallowed unless there was an accompaniment of “The Voice that Breathed O’er Eden,” rice, old shoes and ill-assorted bridesmaids. The happiest couple I know were married at 10 in the morning, to the strains of Dvorak’s “Humoreske,” with a sixpenny wedding-ring from a fancy goods store! At one time it was thought deeply disgraceful not to go on a long and expensive honeymoon, to return to a house and, at least, one smart maid; but nowadays people say, quite cheerfully and sensibly, that they can’t afford more than a week away, and that they are returning to three rooms and a charlady who has promised to come in “and oblige.” Later on, when the first baby was coming, the old type of mother spent weary, eye-aching hours doing yards of pin-tucks and draping the baby’s cot with Swiss muslin and pale blue silk, though she knew perfectly weil she couldn’t afford it. The prettiest, sweetest and most satisfactory baby I have ever seen, or am likely to s«e (no, he isn’t mine!), is sleeping, at this moment, in a drawer out of a chest of drawers!