Yup, the wedding is now only about 6 weeks away (Yikes!) and we are trying out best to balance getting the house (mostly) done before then and getting a few DIY projects for the wedding done. Currently we have 95 ribbon wands (out of 150) done, one half finished cupcake tree, and the inner workings of a photo booth. The only completed project is the favors. That is all well and good (and I might even share a few of the DIY projects with you all here) but what I want to talk about today is the etiquette surrounding weddings.
Let me be the first to say that I think some of the traditions around weddings are just silly. I didn't spend countless hours hand addressing each invitation so that every guest would feel special. We printed out labels on the computer and it saved us massive amounts of time. We aren't printing wedding programs since I don't have the time to put them together and our ceremony is so short that it seems silly. And we aren't doing a bouquet toss or garter toss or cake cutting ceremony since I've always hated those parts of weddings (esp. the bouquet toss) and so I'm not including them in our wedding.
But other parts of wedding etiquette are there for a reason--like RSVP cards. Not everyone chooses to have cards that you mail back in order to RSVP, but every wedding has some sort of RSVP procedure. And, I'll be the first to admit that in the past I haven't always returned my cards on time. But after being on the other end, I will never not mail that little card back ever again. Our RSVP date is April 10--ten days from today. We sent out 100 invitations inviting 216 guests. Currently we have heard from 28 people accounting for 59 people.
One thing that I've noticed is that people around my age (30) are the worst at RSVPing. Most of our respondents (other than our wedding party) are old enough to be members of AARP while most of our guest list is under 50. For whatever reason, the younger generation just isn't as worried about letting people know if they are coming.
But we need to know. We have to give our caterer and the bar a head count one month from the wedding date and that's the amount of food we are paying for and the amount of food that will be available. If we have lots more people show up that we are planning for, we won't have enough food. Conversely, if we plan for way more than we have, we'll end up paying for massive amounts of food that won't get eaten. So we need to know who is coming.
My second gripe has to do with people who don't understand how an invitation works--specifically, the invite their own guests to the wedding. Let me preface this by saying that we have room for 150 people at the wedding and my family alone could account for close to 100 people. Because of that (and the fact that Landon has family too, and we have friends), we had to carefully edit our guest list to make sure that we could invite as many people as possible. This also means that we didn't give hardly anyone a +1 on their invitation. In fact, there are quite a few people invited to the wedding that could have gotten a "and guest" but didn't. We tried to limit our "and guests" to people who had been dating someone long term and were very serious (and we knew about the "other"). In fact, when I counted it up, we sent out 4 +1s in 100 invitations.
However, that hasn't stopped several people from replying that they will be bringing their own guest to the wedding. Now, we did our best to indicate on both the invitations and the save the dates who was invited to the wedding. We even put in a bit on the website about that. But people still insist on bringing guests to the wedding when we hadn't planned for them. We'll make due, but it blows my mind that people would just assume they could bring a guest when there was no indication that it was okay.
So, all that being said, here are a couple of tips for anyone out there who gets invited to a wedding and isn't sure of what to do:
- If you are asked to RSVP, please do so by the date they ask--even if you are saying "NO". It's probably for a purpose and they probably need to know. So mail back that cards, send an email, call them on the phone, or tell them in person. If you don't, don't be surprised if they call you--or if you show up and they say you can't eat or drink.
- When replying to the invitation, don't assume you can bring your own guests. Generally speaking, only the people who's names are on the invitation are invited. If it doesn't say "and Guest" don't assume you can bring an extra person. The hosts probably have a limited guest list and I can almost guarantee that they made some tough choices on who to invite and who to leave off, so respect their choices and don't just bring your own guest. I can also guarantee that they would have rather invited someone else they know and love to their wedding than your random guest that they have probably never met. But more than likely they will not say anything to you since they don't want to be rude.
