Why did so many people marry on Christmas Day?

It’s a question that invites us to delve deeper into festive nostalgia: visions of frosted windows, church bells chiming through winter air, and newlyweds stepping out into a world hushed by snow. But as with so many discoveries in family history, the truth sits a little more firmly in the realm of the practical than the poetic.

If you’ve come across a Christmas Day wedding in your own family research, it might feel like a deliciously romantic surprise: your ancestors choosing the most magical date of the year to tie the knot. Yet behind the tinsel and the tradition lies a story shaped less by mistletoe and more by the realities of working-class life.

Step back into the 18th and 19th centuries and picture it: six-day work weeks, wages docked for any time missed, and employers who didn’t believe in “annual leave," not even for something as momentous as a wedding. For many young couples, Christmas Day wasn’t just a holiday. It was the only day. The one precious pause in the relentless rhythm of work.

Bristol Evening Post, 23 December 1939.

Couples who opted for a Christmas Day wedding would have rarely done so out of a desire to capture a sense of seasonal romance. Christmas Day weddings usually occurred out of necessity.

A Boxing Day wedding in Denbigh from 1903.

Even Dickens understood this cultural truth. When Ebenezer Scrooge begrudgingly grants Bob Cratchit Christmas Day off, he’s echoing the lived experience of countless families, your families, whose routines revolved around long hours, tight budgets and little choice.

Is Christmas Day a bank holiday?

Christmas Day is a traditional holiday and is not, and never has been, a bank holiday in England, Wales or Ireland. It was Sir John Lubbock first introduced bank holidays.

He was a banker and politician who loved his cricket and couldn't stand the idea of competitors gaining an advantage by trading on days he and his staff went to support or play in their local village matches. He introduced the Bank Holidays Act of 1871, which recognised four official bank holidays - Easter Monday, Whit Monday (the first Monday in August), and Boxing Day. The same act did make Christmas Day a bank holiday in Scotland.

In the 1800s, most people worked six days a week and didn't get paid when they didn't work which, of course, the vast majority of people could ill afford. It wasn't like today when you can simply request holidays to marry on whichever day of the year takes your fancy.

It was only with the rise of the trade unions in the 20th century that working conditions and employee rights started to improve and the tradition began to die out.

Arbroath Herald and Advertiser for the Montrose Burghs, 1 January 1937

However, enthusiastic reports of Christmas Day weddings can be found within our collection of historical newspapers right through the 1940s and even into the early 1950s.

Old marriage customs and traditions

The process our ancestors went through in order to arrange a marriage was uncomplicated with just three readings of the banns on three consecutive Sundays being all that was required. An ancient legal tradition, banns are an announcement in church of a couple's intention to marry. The readings provided an opportunity for anybody to declare a reason why the marriage may not lawfully take place.

Most weddings were simple, small affairs with few guests and even fewer of the expensive trappings and traditions associated with modern weddings. Best clothes would be worn as they would be on any Sunday and a short service would be followed by dancing and making merry at home, in the local barn or pub.

Christmas Day weddings appear to have been even more common in inner-city areas, home to large industrial working-class communities. In a number of cities, particularly in London, it was a tradition that churches offered free marriages and baptisms on 25 December. Group weddings appear to have been routinely performed east of St. Paul's Cathedral, and in the poorer quarters of the city.

What were penny weddings?

Penny weddings, so-called because each of the contracting parties paid this modest sum for the privilege of being united in the bonds of matrimony, were another relatively common form of working-class marriages. In fact, they were so common that church ministers would occasionally advertise the speed with which they could perform a ceremony.

By the turn of the 20th century, penny weddings had largely died out as inflation meant that even the very cheapest of ceremonies cost a fee of about six shillings. However, penny weddings were still performed on Christmas Day by a number of churches in London as special acts of festive charity.

Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 28 December 1940

While the practice began to fall out of favour in the early 20th century, Christmas Day weddings enjoyed a brief resurgence during the 1940s as the lives and romances of many young couples were thrown into turmoil by the Second World War. The majority of young men were in military service while a significant number of women were conducting essential war work with leave hard to come by. Many couples used the rare instances of home leave they were given on Christmas Day to wed before they were separated again and sent off to face uncertain futures.

Can you get married on Christmas Day now?

Weddings on December 25 are now virtually unheard of due to improved working conditions, less availability and a sharp increase in the cost of venues, catering and staff during the festive season.

Search our collections of marriage and banns records, as well as our historical newspapers, to discover if your family tree grew a new branch one Christmas Day long ago.