I’m on week three of my away-from-home, care-giving journey, so I still have limited access to my usual library of images. But I broke down and went to Fry’s and bought a new scanner and, as fate would have it, the closest Fry’s outlet is down the street from a large Salvation Army store. There I found a terrific scrapbook from 1936, which is the source of this week’s scans.
The discovery of someone else’s memories is always a little bittersweet. I wonder why they ended up at a place like the Salvation Army instead of a velvet-lined drawer next to a lavender sachet. This particular scrapbook covers the engagement, bridal shower and wedding of a Bay-Area couple, not too different from the couple I wrote about a few months back. In this case, however, the wedding was much larger and took place earlier, in 1936.
I’ve decided to focus only on the bridal shower this week and hope to mine some of the other material in the future. Being a guy, I’m not all that familiar with showers of any type, though I do hear that these days showers are more likely to be multi-gender. But I have a feeling the “bridal shower vs. bachelor party” cliché is still alive and well, and that most men would rather be caught dead than attend a bridal or baby shower.
That was certainly the case back in 1936, when our bride-to-be Sophie was given several different showers by her friends. She meticulously chronicled the events and described each gift on the card that accompanied it.
Bridal showers have their roots in the tradition of dowry get-togethers where family members would gather and contribute items to make a bride seem more attractive and worth marrying.
But the modern bridal shower is widely attributed to a young Dutch couple in the 1890s who were very much in love but could not win the support of the bride’s father, who did not approve of the groom’s financial practices. (He was so generous that he gave most of his money away.)
The Dutch village people wanted this young couple to marry and win the approval of Dad, so they arrived en masse with gifts tucked away inside parasols, which they opened and “showered” on to the bride’s head. Hopefully no one decided to give the bride an anvil.
Since then we have “showered” brides and mothers-to-be with gifts and good wishes prior to the big events of marriage and birth, only now we don’t deliver them via parasol.
Often these occasions are highlighted by various games or other shenanigans among the attendees.
One of the hosts of Sophie’s shower chose a grocery theme and encouraged the attendees to bring food items with funny labels, which they did in great number. As you can see from these examples, 1936 was not a terrific year for humor. But Sophie dutifully wrote the package contents on the label so you can join in on the jokes 73 years later.
There’s more! Go to page 2.
This article was last modified on May 17, 2023
This article was first published on March 6, 2009
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