With a budget in place and knowing the price per person for both the food and alcohol consumption at the reception, you are now ready to draft your wedding guest list.
For the preliminary guest list, you must remember that this is YOUR wedding, regardless of who is paying for it. The guests you are about to invite must be an indispensable core of close family and good friends without whom the wedding day would simply be incomplete. Remember that you MUST include:
- the person and their spouse/significant other who performs the wedding ceremony.
- the spouse/fiancé/fiancée/partner of each invited guest.
- the parents of the children in the wedding party.
- EVERYONE who is invited to the wedding shower, engagement party or any other prenuptial party (office/workplace showers are exempt).
Draft two lists – the MUST invite List A, and a second, discreet, for your eyes only, a MAYBE invite List B. We live in new times and new traditions. Be flexible. Do what is important to you. In trimming the dream List A, ask yourself if you will be OK leaving certain individuals out, and if you can later meet up with them and look them straight in the eye, explaining to them, if you have to, that you didn’t invite them to your wedding because … of budget restraints, etc. (Have a good excuse on hand that will save face.) Of course you will have some friends/relatives that will be miffed, and others will feel like second-rate friends. The final decision is yours, and yours to live with.
Send out the invitations from your List A at least 10 weeks before the wedding. All guests that you send invitations to on your List A, should by etiquette either come to the wedding, or send you a wedding gift. If there are any regrets from your List A, you have your go-to List B. Invitations from List B should be sent six-eight weeks in advance of the wedding. Be careful not to send invitations one week prior to the wedding, for guests will think they are second best. You want all your guests to feel that they are very important people to you.
Once the wedding is over and done with, you will have friends, acquaintances, relatives who were not part of your special day. What now? It is best to let time pass and leave it at that. It is never in good taste to invite the uninvited guests to an after-party, unless you make it very clear to them that they are NOT to bring any gifts. You don’t want your friends to feel that this party is simply a gift grab, or getting something for nothing. After all they were not at the ceremony, they didn’t see you in your wedding attire, and they were not part of the wedding celebration. They did not make the cut. Why invite them now – after the fact?
Choose your guests carefully.
Good Luck!