In seventeenth century New England, weddings were solemn civil affairs, just a visit with the local magistrate to register the marriage: the Puritans rejected nearly all of the Catholic seven sacraments (the religious rituals of baptism, confession, communion, confirmation, marriage, taking holy orders, and the last rites), and therefore held that marriages should not be treated as a religious ceremony. By the middle of the eighteenth century the culture had shifted, as the original hardliners were long gone and a more diverse group of immigrants had gradually moved in, and weddings had become more like what is expected today: a religious ceremony (very frequently held in the bride's or groom's family home, though) followed by a party.

In what records we do have that focus on wedding receptions, dancing figures heavily. For instance, a 1769 wedding celebration in Hatfield, Massachusetts, went into a second day: the 36 guests (18 couples) were treated to a dinner, and then set to dancing through most of the night, following it up with more the next morning. This isn't very different from now, when you get down to it! Dance was just as common a social activity as it is today, arguably even more so. The wealthy held balls in their homes, inviting their large social circle; their middle-class counterparts might invite friends over for dinner and cards, and clear some furniture out of the way for dancing if there was someone in the company who could play the piano for it. Communities would also hold assembly balls, which anyone who could afford a ticket could attend. It's therefore unsurprising that dancing would form the major activity of a wedding celebration.

As far as wedding traditions go, there don't seem to have been many that were recorded. As I recently discussed here, the white wedding dress was a tradition that many in this period would have had access to, since white was fairly fashionable on its own in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and white cotton was readily available. I've also come across a reference to Thanksgiving as a popular wedding date in the 1830s, but I'm not sure how widespread that is. Gifts were often food and drink for the married couple to consume, rather than the extensive list of housewares we now find on wedding registries (more on that here), which would generally be furnished by the family.

It's hard to be specific about the type of food served or number of guests, because they varied quite widely based on the individuals involved. An iced fruitcake was the traditional wedding cake at this time: the first recipe book that specifically referred to a "bride cake" was Elizabeth Raffald's, first published in 1769 (later printing here), with accompanying recipes for sugar and almond icings. There's no evidence that they would eat anything other than what they thought would make a good dinner - beef, venison, mutton, potatoes, etc. The number of guests would also reflect how many people could fit in the home and how many could be fed - certainly many fewer than are invited to the typical wedding today, where the food is catered and a hall is typically rented. The lavish wedding that most aspire to or just expect today is a product of the twentieth century and would not have been expected at the time you're looking at.