This week has gone so fast for me… and I missed Thursday. I was ready to do a ‘Throwback Thursday’ Blog, but now it will look like a “throwback weekend”. 

My husband and I met in a small prairie town where we both worked. He was the telephone foreman in town, and I was a nurse in the 19-bed hospital. We loved the community but some of the “traditions” were new to us. We had a very personal introduction to a “chivaree” party, traditionally conducted for ‘newlyweds’.

 Google has this example posted online: A few days after the couple got settled, the community held a shivaree. The shivaree was a post-wedding noisy party for the community where the newlyweds were pressed into service as hosts. In short, the shivaree was a mock serenade and a roast of the newlyweds.

We had taken a road trip to the mountains for our honeymoon, and on our way back, we stopped to pick up our wedding gifts at my parents’ home in the city. It was a great evening of opening gifts in our new home, tossing wrapping paper and boxes down the back stairs, just to get it out of sight until we had the time to burn the trash in the backyard. 

We finally retired for the night, we made sure that the extension phone was working in our bedroom because we were both “on call” for our jobs. Minutes after our lights were out, our phone rang LOUDLY. I picked up the receiver and heard the dial tone… and the phone kept ringing. My telephone man thought it was the phone in the kitchen that was ringing, It was so dark in the house, and the power was out and the street light in front of our house was out too. There must be an emergency in town, we thought,… and the phone kept ringing! We didn’t have a flashlight, and we didn’t smoke, so we didn’t even have matches to help us find our way through the house. Hubby got the idea that the ‘ringing’ was coming from the basement, but we had to navigate the stairwell that was filled with wrapping paper and boxes. When we finally got down the stairs, we discovered electrical wires taped to the backside of a pole in the basement, and leading to the metal ductwork of the furnace. Somebody had been in our house while we were gone, and it didn’t look like work done by our building contractor. Hubby hoped that if he ripped the wiring, it would stop the incessant ringing telephone, and sure enough, the phone stopped ringing and the lights came back on. We suspected who was responsible for this event… his partner in the telephone company, and our neighbor who worked for the power company. We later learned that they had placed a bell system, normally used in grain elevators, in the metal furnace duct, and wired it to a telephone number at the neighbor’s house. No wonder it was so loud and so annoying!

Minutes after the lights came back on, there was a commotion at both the back and front doors, and about a dozen people were there for “breakfast”... even supplying the ingredients for me to make pancakes for all of them. This was our initiation and celebration from our community. As a matter of fact, most of the town knew that it was going to happen.

The town is much bigger now, and friends who live there haven’t heard of a chivaee in town in years. I guess it is now considered to be ‘old fashioned’. It sure was an event that we have never forgotten. We were the ‘newbies’ in town, but we were properly welcomed by the community.

Tags: Community Wedding Party Friends