My son is getting married the day after tomorrow.

Our family is living in that tender space just before a wedding, where joy, excitement and nervous butterflies all seem to breathe side by side. There is laughter, last-minute preparations, quiet emotion, and that sense that something beautiful is almost here. And what a joy it is, as a mother, to watch two people who both deserve happiness find it in one another.

At times like this, I find myself thinking not only about the future, but also about the past.

I have always been fascinated by customs and traditions from different parts of the world. Perhaps that is because I have spent most of my life at the meeting place of two cultures, Finland, my birth country, and Australia, my adopted one. Both are modern countries, and modern weddings are, in many ways, wonderfully simple compared to the past. Yet if you dig a little deeper, there are old wedding traditions hidden in the roots of our history that are moving, strange, beautiful, and sometimes a little heartbreaking.

It is the Karelian wedding traditions that draw me in most.

Karelians are an ethnic group native to the historical region of Karelia, an area now divided between Finland and Russia. They have long been known as lively, musical, expressive people. My paternal grandparents were both Karelian, and perhaps that is why their history feels to me not distant, but personal. There is something in it that still tugs at me.

Traditional Karelian weddings were not only celebrations. They were also farewells.

When a young man had set his heart on a young woman, he would go to her father’s house with a spokesperson to make a formal marriage proposal. There were negotiations, gifts given to the bride and her family, and if all went well, the young woman then had much to prepare. She would make gifts for her future husband’s relatives and gather together what she would need to take with her into her new life.

Because marriage was not simply the joining of two people. It meant a leaving.

Before the wedding, the bride’s family would arrange a send-off, and this was no light-hearted occasion. There was often much crying. A weeping song artist, sometimes a professional crier, was brought in to sing mournful songs that helped the bride grieve the life she was leaving behind. The songs spoke of her departing from the warmth and affection of her father’s home and going into the unknown of another household, where everything would be unfamiliar. She was expected to weep, and often she wept until she was completely exhausted.

I find that deeply moving.

It seems that in those days, people understood something we often rush past now: that even the happiest changes can carry sorrow in them. That joy and grief are not always opposites. Sometimes they stand side by side, holding hands.

Then, on the evening before the wedding, the bride would have a bridal sauna with her female friends. I love that image. In the midst of all the ritual and emotion, there was still this sacred pause, a moment of cleansing, gathering, preparing, surrounded by women.

The wedding day itself included many ceremonies at the bride’s home, such as the placing of a headpiece on her head, before she was escorted to the groom’s home. Both houses had their own wedding guests, and the groom’s family then held an arrival celebration for the bride.

And even then, the story was not over.

The wedding festivities ended only weeks later, when the bride returned to her childhood home to collect her dowry and seek advice before settling fully into married life. After that, everyday life began, and with it came the reality of learning to live in her new home, often under the strict guidance of her mother-in-law. She might only return to her childhood home once a year, often in early autumn, for a brief rest.

How different things are now.

In two days’ time, I will gain a daughter-in-law. She will not be leaving one household to live under the rules of another. She will not arrive with a dowry. No one has negotiated gifts between families. We have not hired a professional crier, and no one is being sung into exhaustion. So much has changed, and rightly so.

And yet, beneath all the change, something timeless remains.

A wedding still marks a turning point. It is still the beginning of a new family story. It still carries love, hope, leaving, gaining, tenderness, and the quiet ache of time moving forward, whether we are ready for it or not.

The change that is about to take place in our family is a good and beautiful one. I welcome my daughter-in-law with an open heart. I have already come to love and cherish her, and it gives me deep joy to know that she and my son are building a life together.

But just between you and me, there is one old Karelian wedding tradition I would have gladly kept.

The bridal sauna.