The Luckiest Date of the Decade?

July 5, 2007 — -- From tying the knot or hitting the slots, on 7/7/07, a lot of people are hoping to get lucky.

And if Pythagoras were still around, he probably would be too. The mathematician decreed the number seven lucky in ancient Greece, cementing in Western culture a belief that also reigns in Asia and the Middle East.

Wedding-planning Web site TheKnot.com has had 38,000 couples register 7/7/07 as their wedding date -- more than triple the number of couples getting married on any other day of the year.

"That concentration will make it the single largest wedding day in American history," said Carley Roney, founder and editor of TheKnot.com.

For those in the hospitality and wedding-planning industries, that means a deluge of requests from couples willing to pull out all the stops for a No. 7-studded ceremony.

Roney said overwhelmed bakers have hired extra staff to meet the demand for wedding cakes. Nearly all the Ritz-Carlton hotels in the country have multiple weddings booked for 7/7/07; some have been booked for years. Fitting with the date and its popularity, the Hilton Hawaiian Village hotel on Waikiki Beach has seven weddings slated for Saturday.

And for the bride and groom who want a 7/7/07 wedding at a prime location, money is often no object: Ritz-Carlton spokeswoman Vivian Deuschl said one couple offered a hotel $75,000 to bump another wedding for theirs (the offer was politely declined).

The seven obsession doesn't end with the date. Many brides and grooms are bucking tradition to incorporate the number into their wedding as much as possible, including having the ceremony at 7 p.m., serving a seven-course meal, having seven bridesmaids and seven groomsmen, and making sure the bridal suite has a No. 7 on the door.

"We have one couple in Grand Caymen that's getting married at seven minutes after 7 p.m. on a 7-mile beach," Deuschl said.

Virginia teacher Jen Ratliff, who gets married in Arlington Saturday, thought about serving No. 7-shaped cookies at her ceremony. She secured her venue almost two years ago to make sure she and her fiancé, legislative analyst Marshall Rogers, would be able to wed in an outdoor area overlooking Washington, D.C.