Chaldean Wedding, Southfield, MI, 1990

Sahera and Faiz feed each other a piece of one of sixteen wedding cakes, while guests crowd around, gaily waving batons and spangled handkerchiefs. Little boys ride on shoulders so that they too can watch this American ritual of sharing a piece of cake.

Katrina Thomas's notes: Chaldeans are Eastern Rite Catholics, who emigrated from Telkaif in Iraq to the Detroit area, and built their church in Southfield in1948. In 1990 and 1992, I photographed two weddings, keeping customs that are now obsolete. In one such event, women put a boy child on a bed made up for the newlyweds in the hope that the first born will be a son. The other custom is a henna evening for the bride in her home, attended only by women. Today the henna evening is a grand affair attended by both sexes and celebrated in a public place. Wedding receptions have become Americanized. Those traditional elements that remain are the welcoming zeffa, Middle Eastern line dances, and the sound of women expressing joy by ululating, in Arabic known as haullhula.