“Amish babies take a little longer” – Ben Answers Humorous Questions on Amish Weddings & Finding Wives
Here’s another video in my series with Ben (previous video – “Do Amish Believe They’re The Only True Christians?” here). In this one, he answers a question about Amish marriages. A viewer asked the following:
You made a comment about Autumn being the wedding season for the Amish people. I’m not trying to be sarcastic or funny, but is it so they will have their babies in the springtime after they get married? And I say this because they are very agrarian based, and much of their livestock would be on that same cycle of springtime birth.
Now, it is a worthwhile question. So I’m in no way picking on the viewer. But if you watch the video below, you’ll see I realized in real-time (as I was reading it out to Ben), that something was slightly off with the math!
Special hat-tip to the viewer who asked this – who has been a great sport and has a sense of humor himself. He ended up commenting about it on the video: “So yes, my math was off 🙂 But thank you so much for highlighting my numbskull question. When I make a mistake, I own up to it. (BTW I was right about Lancaster County though 🙂 ).
Ben did have a good answer, using himself as an example: “Well, my parents got married November the 12th, and I was born August the 25th, and it’s true – you look at the demographic patterns, a lot of the first-borns are August, September, November.” And we had another chuckle at what he said next.
“Amish babies take a little longer”
Ben also relates a funny story from an interaction with a customer from his time running a market stand. We then look at the Lancaster County Amish tradition of having autumn weddings, and how things have been changing over time (and why). To illustrate, Ben shares the example of his own son’s recent marriage.
Finding a wife?
For an encore, we got another, humorous-sounding (but also good) question from a second viewer:
I always wondered this. Especially small communities – where do they find spouses? Do they bring wives in from other Amish or Mennonite communities?
The wording just struck me as funny (“bring wives in”), and Ben as well. Yet, it is a good question.
Here is part of Ben’s answer: “You can go to other communities for your girlfriends. In small communities that’s what happens…even here in Lancaster, they run back-and-forth in Franklin County, and Perry County, and there’s a lot of mingling with other counties.”
This one was a lot of fun. Check out the video here. Runtime: 6:43. UPDATE: The Amish America Patreon page is now live. That’s going to be the home of Amish America bonus content. If you liked this video, you can get the full one-hour-plus episode (“The Ben & Erik Show”) by joining here. Thanks for your support!
incoming brides
The question almost reminds me of over 150 years ago and mail order brides where a lot of small towns did not have a lot of single women and the men would see ads in the paper for women willing to travel out west to get married or the men would place an ad in the paper for a a bride. I would like to see the look on each other’s faces in the event one or the other embellished the facts about themselves.
Those were pretty high stakes arrangements.
Comfortable
Thanks for havng Ben share with us. He’s seems really confortable on camera. Enjoy his willingness to laugh.
We do have a lot of fun. We are scheduled to record another one of these this week!
CLOTHING
I seen once what the colors of clothing means for the the women could you please tell me again?
Thank you,
Kathy
No Prairie County
Ben’s reference would have been “Perry County.” Perry County is northwest of Lancaster County passing through Dauphin County and a bit of Cumberland County to get there.
Perry County is now the home of lots of Amish and Mennonites. It used to be very quiet, laidback, and “redneck.” I think it was the last county in PA to get a traffic signal and the last county to get a McDonald’s.
Yes – fixed it. Not sure where that came from in my transcription. Nearest Prairie County is I think in Arkansas. That’s a long buggy ride. Thanks!