Ormai la frittata è fatta. Auguroni!*

If the Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, then sometime today, half a world away from our homes in the United States, The Legal Genealogist will be helping make some family history instead of just recording it.

Because today, at a small villa in a village in Tuscany, in the presence and with the active participation of members of the families of both bride and groom, my brother Fred is to marry his beloved Nicole.

Fred is my little brother, nearly a decade my junior, and he has grown into quite a remarkable man. And in Nicole he has met his match in every way. She’s bright, funny, exceedingly tolerant of the antics of Fred’s large and irrepressible family… and she takes no guff from anyone, Fred included.

In a very real way, the ceremony today is a United Nations-type joining. Fred’s heritage, and mine, is German in the paternal line and mostly Scots-Irish, English and Welsh in the maternal line. (With a little French thrown in for good measure.) And Nicole’s father is from India while her mother is half-Irish and half-Italian.

And some tradition from each of those heritages will be included in today’s celebration. I can’t say much about what Nicole’s folks will do, because I haven’t been in on the planning there, but I’ve been up to my ears in the planning for our family’s side of things.

I sure hope Fred and Nicole are still speaking to me after the wedding.

Oh, my part will be just fine. I get to do the handfasting with lots of brightly-colored ribbons. Blue and white for Scotland. Red, white and blue for Northern Ireland and England (and the United States and France, but those are just along for the ride here). Green and red and white for Wales. Or, in the more traditional meanings of handfasting ribbons: passion, strength, lust, fertility (red); tranquility, patience, devotion, sincerity (blue); purity, concentration, meditation, peace (white); and finances, fertility, charity, prosperity, health (green).

I even found a socially-acceptable version of what to say while tying the knot:

As this knot is tied, so are your lives now bound. Woven into these ribbons, imbedded into their very fibers, are all the hopes of your friends and family, and of yourselves, for your new life together. With the fashioning of the knot, I tie all the desires, dreams, love and happiness wished for here in this place for your lives, as long as you both shall live.

Sigh… sweet, isn’t it?

My problem is that I don’t think the happy couple is going to believe that our oldest brother was the one who came up with the German customs to incorporate into the wedding.

Nothing really outrageous, of course. I mean, hey, we didn’t ask for all that big a ransom when we kidnapped the bride. And it wasn’t our fault that the horse hired to pull the cart with all the bride’s worldly goods up to the door of the bridegroom’s house ate the wedding flowers, was it? And the villa operators really shouldn’t have minded all the crockery broken up against the door, right?

I just wish the Italian authorities would lower our bail…

 
“Ormai la frittata è fatta. Auguroni!” translates as “Congratulations on tying the knot!”