Three of my friends are getting married on the same day next month. I would have loved to wedding hop (albeit sounding a bit unseemly), but they happen to be in three different parts of the world. But they do have one thing in common: they are all Chinese. This happy clash of weddings are especially prominent in Chinese culture. A user on ChinesePod was intrigued when he got two invitations and begged to know why.  

Here enters the emperor’s calendar (a.k.a the yellow calendar) or 皇历（黄历）/huang2 li4.  It’s a traditional calendar which has extensive information on how lucky and unlucky each day is, what one should and shouldn’t do on that day. It’s the lunar calender with fortune telling features if you will.  That’s what most Chinese base their decision on when choosing the wedding date. While many do not entirely believe in the validaty of the 黄历, they see it as an auspicious tradition that doesn’t hurt to keep. 

But a lucky day is not all. You don’t want to get married in the melting heat nor freezing cold no matter how lucky the day is. You want spring or fall, which narrows down your selection much like the process of refining your google search. That’s not all. You want the weekend in order to make it easy for your guests. Now, you see how we’ve gone from 365 days to a handful ones which meet all of the criteria. The art of the wedding date.