We were lucky enough to get the most incredible venue for our wedding which has seriously made planning things a lot easier! I'm assuming next is booking our caterer...which is why we were writing down our guest list.
Which brings me to all you fellow married bloggers! Help me out! I have some serious questions that need some serious answers!
How did you cut down your guest list?
How did you avoid making those people that weren't invited not feel bad?
Were you scared people would be mad at you?
Did it help a lot with your budget?
There are a few of my questions. If you have any other wedding planning advice please feel free to fill me in!
 |
| Here is a sneak peek at our venue!! |
I'm so excited for you! (Probably because your engagement story made me cry a little bit!)
ReplyDeleteI'm no expert, but we cut down by saying unless they were relatives or parents' friends, if we hadn't had a meaningful conversation with them in the last year then we wouldn't invite them to the reception. We also held a little cupcake and coffee reception straight after the ceremony so everyone felt they had a chance to congratulate us, even if they weren't invited to the main reception, which I think helped with any bad feelings - not that there were many but one of my parent's friends said he was disappointed we hadn't invited him and his family to the sit down meal, but he has a family of six and there was just no way to accommodate them!
Anyway, I'm not quite sure how this turned into an essay! :p Good luck!!
I agree with Laura inviting the closest family members to you and yours is who I would start with. If you find that it is still to long make it a no kid wedding; Sharlene did that. Hope this helps :) and then invite everyone else to the reception for dancing etc.
ReplyDeleteI think for us, we picked a venue that could only hold 130 people max, so I HAD to cut the list down. I decided right off the bat, no work people, cause that just gets awkward to invite some but not others, so I just told people at work, we're not inviting work people (unless you have really good friends there that you hang out with outside of work, I had 2 of those, and just told them not to talk about it), then we really just stuck to close family and friends. It was hard, cause I had to cut out groups of friends, like all of my friends from my engineering classes, but there were just too many. So I stuck to really close friends from college. I don't think anyone was totally bummed and if they were, and stopped talking to me, then they weren't really a friend to begin with, ya know? This is your day and so you should have people there that YOU and Shane want there celebrating with you. Good luck and try not to stress, it's suppose to be fun planning a wedding!
ReplyDeleteYayy!!!! Seeing you post about the wedding makes me so happy! :) And I totally know how you feel because I ended up having to do the same thing...sorta. We had our actual ceremony in our back yard so the max number of people we could invite was 80. For that part of the day, we strictly invited family and a few close friends and said that no kids were allowed. This may sound mean, but nothing is more frustrating than having a bunch of kids screaming and running around during a time that's supposed to be intimate and special, which is why we came to that decision. I did have family members who were offended by that, but my thought is, if they're offended by a little thing like not taking their kids, then they probably don't care that much about being there anyway. The day is about YOU!! If people are offended by your decisions, they probably weren't planning on celebrating you and Shane in the first place. Our reception was a little bigger so the list didn't have to be as small and kids were allowed. For that, we all (me, Matt, my parents, his parents) made a list of people that we couldn't imagine the celebration without and then narrowed it down from there.
ReplyDeleteSorry for the novel! Hope that helps!! Can't wait for more details about the big day!!