On 5 May 2001, at 0:17, Cherie wrote:
> I just came back from my first "Tom Thumb Wedding"..I thought that
> this was just an isolated event that this particular family made
> up..but came home and found several references to Tom Thumb weddings
> (mostly old pictures of people's great grandma's in a TT Wedding) on
> the Internet.
>
> I was wondering if anyone has ever heard of this?...I would also like
> to know the history of Tom Thumb Wedding...thanks
I had never heard of this, either - dressing children up in wedding
regalia and staging a pretend wedding. On the one hand it seems
cute; on the other hand it seems exploitive and manipulative.
Parents of children are not the only guilty ones here - in
researching this on the web, I get the idea that churches stage Tom
Thumb weddings a lot.
In searching the web, I too am just coming up with old pictures. I
don't think this is something real common to our culture.
I would venture a guess that the original idea came from seeing
pictures of the famous Tom Thumb wedding, when midget entertainer Tom
Thumb married dwarf Lavina Warren in a very fashionable wedding in
1863. The children's Tom Thumb Wedding seems to be a tribute to that
famous event in history.
http://www.assumption.edu/WHW/IconsFemale/LittlestBeauty.html
Alan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
