When you Google the word honeymoon, up pops 266,000,000 potential links. I was just trying to find the origin of the word, but I could have found many, many great places for a honeymoon. No, I didn’t just get married. I’m not even writing about a honeymoon. Well, wait a minute. On second thought, I do sort of have a honeymoon about to happen in the book I just turned in to my editor. But what really got me thinking about honeymoons is my nephew’s wedding this weekend. He and his bride are off to Jamaica for their honeymoon. Both are in their thirties. Neither has been married previously so they were ready for a special getaway honeymoon.
So while they have me thinking about honeymoons, I wasn’t Googling the word to find romantic destinations. I was trying to find out why we call it a honeymoon. I found two explanations. So I guess you can take your pick. Both sound good.
“Honeymoon” was the month after a wedding, when the bride’s father would give the groom all the mead he wanted. Mead is a honey beer while the Babylon calendar was a lunar calendar. The Babylonians started calling the month the “honey month” but we now call it a “honeymoon.” (Quora.com)
Origin of honeymoon according to the online Dictionary – Mid 16th century (originally denoting the period of time following a wedding): from honey + moon. The original reference was to affection waning like the moon, but later the sense became ‘the first month after marriage.’
I like both explanations, although we can hope a couple’s honeymoon lasts longer than the waning of the moon. Of course, we do often say “the honeymoon is over” at the first sign of a tiff. I hope the honeymoon lasts a good long time for my nephew and also for my granddaughter who got married in May.
From all those links on Google about the perfect honeymoon destination, honeymoons are now serious business with all sorts of exotic and romantic places to spend the first days or weeks as a married couple. People have had honeymoons for a long time as evidenced by the origin of the term. But they may have been a tad simpler back in the day unless you happened to be born into a super rich family. My mother and father went on a honeymoon. This picture is Mom on her honeymoon in 1938. I think they went to Cumberland Falls.
Fast forward twenty-six years and my husband and I got married. We didn’t have any money so I’m not sure how we scraped up any cash to follow in my parents’ footsteps and spend a weekend at Cumberland Falls. That was before people carried money via a plastic card in their pocket. But we did scrounge up the money somehow. Our honeymoon was eventful. The night after our wedding turned icy. Darrell likes to brag about chipping the ice off the car to open the door after we spent the night at a motel on the way to Cumberland Falls. Then once at the Falls, we found the cheapest motel we could. This one was so cheap, I don’t think they turned the heat on. We did go look at the falls – in our winter coats. With our wedding in November, we might have chosen a warmer place for our honeymoon. But there was that no money problem. That was a problem too when we went to the lodge for dinner. Very little on the menu was in our price range. But even if we didn’t have the perfect honeymoon weekend, we are still married all these years later.
I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to how many honeymooning couple have a picture of the falls in their honeymoon scrapbooks. The picture up top was part of a British book about sights in America, but it doesn’t take much imagination to think it could have been drawn to illustrate a honeymoon trip. Only one of my books mention anything about a honeymoon trip and that is in Angel Sister where Victor and Nadine go to Louisville. That wasn’t actually a honeymoon trip, but rather Victor reporting for training before going overseas in World War I. But I’ve left many characters on the brink of honeymoons at the end of my stories.
What about you? Did you go on a honeymoon after you married? If so, where did you go? Whether you did or not, what would be your pick for a perfect honeymoon destination today?
