Honey given to a couple at marriage in several traditions — and a careful look at the honeymoon story, which is repeated everywhere and supported by much less than it appears.
Current status
Local living practice
Practised now, in a limited area or by a limited number of communities.
Wedding honey customs continue in some of the traditions where they are documented. The record here is general rather than tied to one community, so the status is asserted only at the level the ethnographic and current record supports.
Feeding honey to a bride or groom, or to both, is recorded in a number of separate traditions, generally with an explicit sense of wishing sweetness on the marriage. Honey also appears in marriage-related gift exchange and in wedding foods, and in some settings in the contract or reception rather than in the ceremony.
As with hospitality, the striking thing is how often unrelated societies arrive at the same gesture. Sweetness as a wish for the future is about as portable a metaphor as exists, and it needs no transmission between cultures to appear in two of them.
This site treats the mead etymology as folk etymology: a story attached to the word later because it is satisfying, not a record of where the word came from. The honest position is that the word is built from honey and moon, that its earliest attested sense is about waning affection, and that no documented mead-drinking custom is the source.
Honey attracts folk etymologies and invented antiquity more than almost any other food, and a site about honey that repeated them would be doing the thing it exists to correct. The wedding customs are genuine and documented; the etymology attached to them is not, and both statements can be made on the same page.
That 'honeymoon' derives from a mead-drinking custom, that wedding honey customs share a common origin, or that any of them is ancient. The etymology is folk etymology; the customs are separate and separately documented.
Widely repeated and not supported by current evidence. Listed so the correction is here rather than only the claim.
Widely repeated and not supported by the early attested usage of the word, which uses the waning moon as an image for fading first affection rather than describing a drinking custom.
What this does not claim: That no mead was ever drunk at a wedding. The point is narrower: no documented drinking custom is the source of the word.
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
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