Overcoming the Guest List Blues
By jackieandtom | posted on July 19, 2012 at 4:46pm
With less than two months left until the wedding, invitations are heavy on my mind. The invitations are fun to put together and address, the only problem is that it means we have to finalize the guest list… ::panic::
It’s the most important day of our lives, and we want all our friends and family to be there. Unfortunately it’s not possible to include EVERYONE due to space and budget, so we had to make some tough decisions.
I’m very organized when it comes to this wedding, so I have an excel spreadsheet including every single person I want to invite. Everyone who is definitely invited is in black and everyone who I’m not sure if we can invite or not is in red. The people who we definitely want to invite, but probably won’t come due to traveling far distances or if they have told me they can’t come are in blue. This way it gives me a visual on what I’m working with when I addressed the invitations. (When I say I, I mean my mom’s friend. My handwriting is atrocious and I don’t want people to think they are getting an invitation to a five-year-olds birthday party when they see the envelope in the mail haha.)
It was very hard to decide what to do because the last thing we want to do is offend anyone. It’s a very difficult decision because we really care about all the friends and family that we have grown to know and love throughout our lives and we don’t want people to feel slighted. It’s also difficult because as you can probably imagine, people tend to be grouped together with the whole, “Well I can’t invite this person and not invite that person because that would be rude.”
Luckily, some people told us prior to sending out the invitations they definitely will not be able to make it, so that allowed us to slip in a few more people. A few people we really wanted to invite and we knew would have a great time date or no date, we invited them without a date. I know the “old school” thinking is that it is tacky to do that, but if they are okay with it, go for it.
I will leave you with a few tips to consider when sending out those invites:
-Who can you see being at your wedding? Who can you not see being at your wedding?
-Be prepared for people inviting themselves to your wedding. Yes, I said it. I wasn’t prepared to have those conversations and it was mega-awkward.
-Invite who YOU both want. Not who your Aunt wants, or who your friends want to be there. Who YOU want to be there on the biggest day of your lives!
I can honestly say this is probably one of the hardest things I have had to do in my whole life but we overcame the guest list blues and you can too! Can we get an amen for overcoming the guest list blues?
