I have this joke with my wife that I’m going to start a website on which I will post facts that I think are true, however I will have done no research whatsoever to prove these theories. And these aren’t weird facts like whether there’s life on Neptune or if dogs can understand French better than Spanish. Rather, these “facts” just come from everyday situations.
For example, last week we were buying ice cream and, without warning, I announced, “I bet vanilla ice cream outsells chocolate ice cream three to one.” This is actually a fact I could look up, but instead of using something silly like sales numbers, I explained my logic with a very unscientific reasoning like, “If you’re just eating a bowl of ice cream, then, sure, most everyone would prefer chocolate. But vanilla wins in the long run because it’s the only flavor you want with brownies, cookies, and pie.” How this “a la mode” caveat resulted in vanilla winning by a score of three to one, I can’t say. It just sounded about right.
As you can gather, this game is really silly. (Or, if you’re my wife, this game is annoying as hell.)
And yet, this week I found myself playing this game with weddings. Specifically, I was thinking about how it was currently November, and not a lot of people get married in November. Which quickly led to the following, non-researched hypothesis:
In America, November is the month in which the fewest weddings occur.
Here’s how I came up with that hypothesis: First, I started ranking the months of the year in order of popularity for weddings:
1. June (duh)
2. September (due to Labor Day weekend)
3. May (due to Memorial Day weekend)
4. July (due to 4th of July weekend)
5. August (still summer)
6. April (spring, flowers, pretty)
7. October (fall, foliage, pretty)
Again, let me stress that I have no data supporting these facts whatsoever. And yet, they have to be true, right? Okay, maybe May is second and September is third, but overall, this list looks pretty good. Great job, Peter!
Then it gets tougher. December is, in general, not an overly popular month for weddings, with the big exception of New Year’s Eve. But that exception is big enough that I decided December must be eighth.
February came next. Even though the weather is crummy in most of North America, you still have Valentine’s Day and President’s weekend, which equals mid-winter destination wedding.
March has better weather, but no long weekends. So that seemed good enough for tenth place.
Which meant it was down to January and November. I struggled with this for a bit, but see if you can follow my logic for putting January ahead of November:
- They both have long weekends (MLK Day and Veteran’s Day), but I feel like few people get married Veteran’s Day weekend, mostly because everyone forgets it’s a holiday weekend
- They both have other major holidays (New Year’s Day and Thanksgiving) but New Year’s is a much better occasion for weddings than Thanksgiving weekend. Why? New Year’s weekend is about partying. Thanksgiving is about tryptophan.
- In November, everyone’s already too busy making plans for the holidays. And in January...well, there’s kind of nothing to do. So let’s have a wedding.
And so, I applaud you, couples who have gotten married in November. You’ve bucked the trend and showed originality...at least as far as my suspect logic is concerned.
Oh, and by the way, I bet that at November weddings, guests pick the steak over the salmon like four to one.
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