The French call a stag night the burial of boyhood, and Germans smash plates
The pre-wedding send-off takes wildly different forms. French speakers call it the burial of a boy's life, Swedes once named it Sven's Eve, and in South Africa the groom is not supposed to know it is happening. Germans add a separate night where guests smash old crockery to scare off envious spirits.
The custom is old. Ancient Spartans reportedly held a dinner with toasts on a groom's last night as a single man, as early as the 5th century BC. The word bachelor first meant a young knight in training and was applied to an unmarried man in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the 14th century. In the 19th century a British stag night was often a formal black-tie banquet hosted by the groom's father, with toasts to the couple.
Sweden's version, the svensexa, is documented from the 17th century and may have followed the women's party, the möhippa. The church disliked it because guests turned up to weddings hungover. Nineteenth-century respectability reshaped it into a dinner party starting at six, and until the 1960s or so it involved little beyond food and drink; today it often begins with a mock kidnapping a few weekends before the wedding. In France, groups of young men in Lyon were already celebrating in the 1830s over a famous dish of giant dumplings.
Germany splits the tradition in two. The groom has his Junggesellenabschied, a bachelor farewell, while the couple also host a Polterabend on the eve of the wedding, when guests break porcelain and earthenware for luck, a practice said to predate Christianity. In some regions anyone still unmarried at 30 may be dressed up by friends and made to do silly chores, often cleaning.
Elsewhere, the party has become a travel industry. British stag weekends often head to Kraków, Dublin or Riga, and Americans favour Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville or Mexico. Canadians sometimes hold a stag and doe for both partners that doubles as a wedding fundraiser, and in Manitoba a public ticketed social with a silent auction and a buffet called the midnight lunch.
Source: Bachelor party
