Vintage Thingies Thursday: Greek Wedding Crowns

These are the crowns my husband and I wore at our big fat Greek wedding. They were his grandmother's. She brought them from Greece in the early 1920s.

She was a young woman who had been summoned to marry the young man she'd met in the village who had gone off to America to escape conscription by the Turkish army. She was shy and scared, but thrilled when she saw the glories of San Francisco. She thought she would love living there. They got married in the Greek Orthodox Church and to her dismay, moved to the wild woods of Northern California where he worked in a lumber mill. No big city life for her. As the family story goes, she cried when she found out. For months. But there were many Greeks in Crescent City, and she adjusted to her rustic lifestyle.

She passed these crowns to her daughter, my mother-in-law, who passed them down to me. The artificial orange blossoms have faded a bit, and my mother-in-law had to replace the ribbon that connects them, but they have held up rather well.

In the Greek Orthodox wedding ceremony, the bride and groom are crowned as the king and queen of their home. Rather a lovely symbol.

I hope my girls want to wear these someday. I'm saving them just for them. Wasabi Girl is named after this wonderful woman.

For more vintage goodies, visit Confessions of an Apron Queen.