Honeymoon is a private and intimate time for the newly wed couple. It is a special time for the new marriage to set down its roots... the only vacation you will ever take that has such meaning and significance to the most important relationship of your life. It is a time to shut out the world for a while, to look only at each other and to know that if each other is all you ever have, it will be more than enough.

There are various explanantions for the origin of the tradition and also the name of honeymoon. The word honeymoon has its roots in Norse word "hjunottsmanathr" which was anything but blissful. The Northern European history describes it as the abduction of a bride from the neighboring village. It was imperative, that the abductor, who is husband to be, take his bride to be into hiding for period of time. His friends assured his and her safe keeping and kept their whereabouts unknown. Once the bride's family gave up their search, the bridegroom returns to his people. This folkloric explanation presumably is the origin of today's 'honeymoon', for its original meaning meant 'hiding'.

The Scandinavian word for honeymoon is derived, in part, from an ancient Northern European custom in which the newlyweds drank a daily cup of honeyed wine called 'mead' for the first month of their married life.

In Irish, the word honey is from "meala". The word for honeymoon is "mi na meala", meaning the "month of honey" and refers to how the bride and groom would spend that period of time. Irish monks first produced the fermented honey brew called mead for mead for medicinal purposes; then found it could make well people feel even better. Following the wedding a sufficient amount of mead was given to the bride and groom, along with special goblets, so they could share the unique brew for one full moon after the wedding--and thus the term honeymoon was coined. It was believed that this delicate yet potent drink was the best way to ensure a good beginning for a new marriage and it was also believe to endow powers of virility and fertility.

With so many explanations for the origin of the name and tradition of honeymoon, the most likely source is the medieval custom of couple consuming the mead for the first month of their marriage to ease them into married life and traditionally to increase their fertility. Honeymoons were a way to encourage conjugal bliss and the creation of children, a month of sanctioned sex.

Honeymoons are traditionally fraught with sexual innuendo coming from the time when most people didn't have sex until their wedding night. The wedding night and the following ones, became embued with a special sexual aura that everyone, including family and friends, would take advantage of. At one time, it was customary for all the female members of a bride's family to prepare her for bed on the wedding night and personally taking her to her new groom's bedroom, whispering instructions to the bride along the way. More recently, friends and well-wishers have been known to stand outside the bridal suite and make as much noise as possible. The idea being calling more attention to the fact that carnal relations are taking place in the bridal chamber.

Nowadays, when very few brides and grooms are virgins, wedding night and honeymoon has somewhat lost its appeal. Honeymoon is taken more as vacations. It is a kind of holiday from long lasting wedding planning, a chance for the newly wed couple to decompress after months of stress and tension of huge wedding. Some couples even put off their honeymoon until they have some money to spend. But they forget that two years after getting married, it won't be a honeymoon but just a holiday.

A honeymoon is not just getting away from people and not just a vacation. It helps in establishing the new marriage. Honeymoon is casting off of your old life and the beginning of the new one. A honeymoon literally means going away, symbolically and physically, from everybody one knows to a place where no one knows them and where the newly wed could stay together and know more about each other and establish long lasting bond.

Wedding brings two people together physically but honeymoon confirms it and sets the tone for how intimate and passionate the rest of years together will be.