Weddingbee boards

Someone gifted us ours, but a few years ago I made one for a friends wedding, and like nyemmamaria said, don't stress out too much.  It's pretty easy to make a broom.  Just get some really pretty, thick ribbon and wrap it.  I don't know where you live, but look around at crafty stores.  All the brooms are pretty scrawny to start, it's just not going to look like anything until you start decorating it.

I know this is gonna sound crazy but my friend went to a dollar store and raided their halloween section...she bought a witch's broom for a dollar, took out the webs and used beautiful blue ribbon....it was perfect!

Now that halloween is close you should check the stores for deals.  

Whilst people associate this with Arican American slave traditions, it is also a European tradition, practised in Scottish, Irish and Welsh culture for centuries. It originated from pagan traditions involving sweeping away the past. It is also present in Romany traditions, and again has pagan roots.

It was widely practised from medieval times onwards in all of Great Britain, especially amongst the working classes, who couldn't take time off to get married... they would therefore take the symbol of their work (in many cases, for an unskilled labourer, this would be a mop or a broom) with them to be married quickly, and some would use it in the ceremony. By the 1700s it became synonymous with "common law" marriages, or those which were not 100% legitimate. When marriage legality was being discussed in parliament in England (I think in the late 1700s but it could have been the early 1800s... English law has confusing common laws and written laws, seeing as our legal system is thousands of years old, and the two are always being updated) then I remember reading that, when common law marriage was discussed, the conclusions of the politicians were that it had "no more legality than jumping the broom".

So there are different traditions about it depending on where you're from...