New Square Wedding

Sunday night I went to a Square wedding, it was a really interesting experience. To start off with, the wedding was of relatives of mine, where the chosson and Kallah were both related to us and each other. So the whole wedding was one big family wedding.

Here’s a little diagram to understand how everyone was related.

When we got there for the wedding it was late already, past 10:00. We missed the Chupah but they had just finished eating the main course. So when we got there relatives came over to say hello and surprisingly they did all speak English. Then one of my father’s cousins prepared me and my mother a seat and a main dish, and she told us to sit and eat. At this time they started dancing.

By them they do things very different. They don’t have 2 dances, but rather they eat first and then have one long dance for the rest of the night. So as we were sitting eating it was right next to them dancing so it was some cool entertainment, to sit facing them dancing.

The next different thing is that the hall is very different, it has 3 floors. The men get the first floor and they have a huge room. Then the woman are on the third floor and they have a medium sized room. I found this very strange, I have never seen a wedding before where the men’s section and woman section are on completely separate floors. It made it feel less like a wedding and more like a woman’s party.

Although, on the second floor, when you go to hang up your coat, that room is filled with windows and if you look down then you can see the men dancing, but there’s such a height difference between the two, that you can barely see faces.

Another thing I noticed was the clothing, besides for the obvious chassidish garb, I noticed that the girls all looked like they were wearing uniforms. The teenage girls I mean, they had white blouses, with jumpers. Not fancy jumpers that can look nice, but uniform looking jumpers. All the girls looked like they were wearing the same clothes, making it look more like a uniform.

The little girls had gowns and their hair was done fancy, but yet they didn’t seem to be dancing much, they were laying down on the stage part where the Kallah’s table was. I figured it’s probably because they go to a wedding every night, that this just isn’t new to them anymore. I mean this was the only dance, so it’s not liked they got danced out before. But then when the ices came they all ran over to get some.

Overall, it was a really cool wedding, I’ve been to a Square wedding once before when I was younger, but there he married a Sephardi girl, so that was different in a different way.

We were talking to some relatives that we never met before and it was actually funny how these chassidish woman who have 12 kids on average think it’s amazing how my mother was able to raise a bunch of twins. Not to take away from my mother’s greatness or anything.