Long before flower wreaths and beaded necklaces, ribbons were often a girl’s first real accessory — the piece she reached for on a Sunday or a holiday, wound around her head with the rest cascading down the back in a kind of waterfall. Even without real flowers on hand, girls found workarounds: a plain vine bent into a headband, wrapped in ribbon and decorated until it read as a crown in its own right. Ribbons and necklaces were, understandably, always considered welcome gifts.
Nowhere did a ribbon matter more than at a wedding, in the most emotionally loaded moment of the whole ceremony: undoing the bride’s braid. Seated on a barrel draped in a sheepskin coat, the bride would have her braid loosened by her new husband, who took out the ribbon for himself, before her bridesmaids finished unbraiding it entirely — a moment that was, by tradition, both joyous and genuinely sad, marking the end of one kind of freedom and the start of a new status, before the bride’s now-loose hair was covered with a headscarf.
Hair itself carried a thicket of superstition that ribbons were only one piece of. Cutting your own hair was considered dangerous — hair was believed to link a person to the heavens, so trimming it yourself risked shortening your own life, and girls in particular were warned it might “cut off” their future suitors. Cut or combed-out hair was never simply thrown away; burning it was the safer custom, tied to a folk tale about a bird that built a nest from a stray hair and cursed its former owner with headaches until the chicks finally left. Even combing had its rules — no combing after dark, if a girl wanted to stay young — and no one, by custom, ever cut a relative’s or spouse’s hair, for fear of stirring up conflict in the family.
