Manitoba’s rite of passage The wedding social, and all its oddball traditions, somehow hasn't gone the way of the dodo By: Jen Zoratti  Posted: 7:00 PM CST Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2018

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/11/2018 (2191 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Every Friday and Saturday night, in cities and towns across Manitoba, people gather in community centres to do the Boot Scootin’ Boogie and eat ripple potato chips off paper plates. They buy silent-auction tickets and drink rye and Cokes out of plastic cups (or maybe $3 Bud Lights).

Why? Because someone’s getting married.

Welcome to the Manitoba wedding social, one of the province’s weirdest, most time-honoured traditions. Socials sit at the confluence of fun celebration and dreaded social obligation, and it doesn’t matter if you love them or hate them: you’re going to them. Or you’re buying a support ticket. Either way, you’re out $10.

The wedding social, as a concept, is decades old, and was intended to get a young couple started on their lives together.

Now, Canadians are getting married later — if at all. And many couples have already merged two independent adult lives, and two complete sets of flatware.

So, it would stand to reason that, by 2018 metrics, the Manitoba wedding social would be considered quaint and outmoded, a relic from a not-so-distant past.

And yet, the tradition seems to be both bigger and more popular than ever.

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Tom Langrell and Catherine Peters, both 26, had their wedding social last Saturday night at Crescentwood Community Centre. The born-and-raised Winnipeggers were always planning on having a social. “I don’t think it was something we considered not doing,” Langrell said. “It wasn’t something we thought twice about. And as soon as we got engaged, people were like, ‘When’s the social?’”

When the Free Press connected with them a few days prior, they were in the homestretch of planning.

“It’s been insanity,” Peters said. “We’re both interior designers and I study project management, so staying on top of projects is in my wheelhouse. But when you’ve never held a social before, you can’t predict all the moving parts.”

While the basic framework of a Manitoba social hasn’t changed — you rent a community club, you hire a DJ, you serve a “late lunch” of rye bread, cheese cubes, pickles and kielbasa — they aren’t the lo-fi affairs they were, say, 30 years ago. The evolution of the silent raffle, for example, is perhaps the most striking change. Couples and their wedding parties are now expected to assemble multiple prize baskets (preferably with a cohesive theme) as well as a few big-ticket grand prizes, such as a pair of Winnipeg Jets tickets or flat-screen TVs.

For their own social, Langrell and Peters pulled out all the stops, with a game station, a band and a good variety of prizes. The couple also eschewed the kielbasa and rye bread for burgers and fries from Red Top, which has personal significance to the groom.

“You gotta get people away from the party mix and on the dance floor. I’ve been to socials where everyone’s sitting there and it’s like a glorified bingo night,” Langrell says with a laugh.

Sure, Peters and Langrell would like to raise some money for their big day in June 2019 and their honeymoon in Greece. But they also want to show people a good time.

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Google “Manitoba wedding social,” and the first hit is socialsguide.com — a comprehensive planning website put together by web developer Jay Friesen.

“I did a lot of research, talking to people I knew and attending any social I could get a ticket to in order to learn more,” he says.

Socials, he suspects, are getting bigger and more sophisticated.

“The internet and social media have made it easier for people to share their ideas and experiences, which makes the event planning much easier, but also tends to make events more uniform,” he says. “I think companies are less inclined to donate items to socials now, and more and more donations from companies are effectively coupons.”

The biggest trend Friesen has noticed is the advent of the Golden Ticket.

“It’s a large ticket item, often a voucher for a vacation, and the only way to get entry in the draw is to buy a larger denomination ticket pack,” he explains. “So the only way to get a chance to win is buying, for example, a $100 pack of tickets which would include many regular tickets, some grand-prize tickets and a single Golden Ticket.

“I’ve heard of, but not yet seen myself, that some socials have cars as prizes. I assume they are donated by family or friends though, since the LGCA (Liquor, Gaming and Cannabis Authority of Manitoba) limits purchased prizes to a maximum value of $500.”

If socials seem like they’re getting bigger, it could be because people are spending more on weddings. A 2015 Weddingbells.ca survey found the average cost of a Canadian wedding is $30,717. That means there’s more pressure on socials to make a profit.

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When Emma Durand-Wood moved to Winnipeg from Vancouver in 2008, she started a blog called Winnipeg O’ My Heart to document her adventures as a new Winnipegger. One discovery, of course, was the Manitoba wedding social — or, as she puts it, a provincewide phenomenon that “seemingly violated all traditional rules of etiquette.” She found the whole concept strangely fascinating.

“I thought it was very strange and, to be honest, kind of shocking — the idea of a fundraiser to pay for your wedding,” she says. “The notion that you would invite guests to a party and not just ask them to pay their own way, but to also pony up additional funds to help you make more money for your own benefit, that was just baffling to me. Yet, very few people appeared to have any qualms about that, it was just the norm here.”

I ask her if socials played a role in welcoming her to her adopted city.

“I’ve only been to three or four over the years, and because I’ve always had kind of an ‘armchair anthropologist’ interest in the phenomenon, I have fun playing a mental game of social bingo, checking off all the things that I’ve been told to expect: Ripple chips on a paper plate? Check. Cheesy dance circles to Love Shack or line dances that everyone mysteriously excels at? Check. Meat shoulder? Check,” she says.

“So, while I wouldn’t say that the social itself made me feel welcome, in reflecting on this, I think learning about and participating in a ritual that’s so commonplace did contribute to me feeling like I understood the local culture, and therefore like I was becoming a Winnipegger. I guess it was kind of a rite of passage.”

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If the norms around weddings and marriage itself are changing, why do wedding socials persist?

“I think they stick around because they’re fun,” says Socialsguide.com’s Friesen.

“As an attendee, it’s a cheap and friendly alternative to going to a bar, while also supporting the people or causes you care about. When I got married, I enjoyed planning a fun event to celebrate with all the people I care about, including many I could not invite to the wedding itself.”

Langrell would agree with that assessment.

“Winnipeg has such a small-town vibe to it. I’ve been to socials in literally every corner of the city — Kildonan, Transcona, Charleswood — because you have connections to people and you want to support them,” Langrell says.

He’s been to enough socials that he’s seen certain trends, including the growing prevalence of themed socials. “Socials seem to get bigger and better over time. I think you can lean on people’s creativity to keep coming up with new ideas to keep socials fun and engaging.”

“To me, it seems the Manitoba wedding social is just one of those things that’s been around for so long that no one really questions it, and it works because it’s essentially based on reciprocity (I went to your social, now you come to mine),” Durand-Wood says. “And that reciprocity just sort of keeps the whole thing in perpetual motion.

“Then there’s also the fact that it is such a Manitoba thing,” she says. “I think it’s only human to embrace expressions, customs and other practices that both distinguish you from some people and unite you with others.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti