Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Keeping the A-listers separate from the B-listers

Guest lists are supposedly one of the biggest problems that arises during wedding planning. Thankfully, that is now pretty much past for us. We have his side, my side, our parents' sides. The trouble is, save-the-dates.

Now, we're not actually doing real save-the-dates. There will be no cute photos or magnets or other such things going through the postal system. Instead we're planning on sending out an e-mail that includes our wedding website's address.

And it's really the announcement of the wedding website that we're more interested about, because all the people who are really important to us already know the date. But we want people to know about the website because we already have those in-crowd members who are booking flights and looking at hotels, and we want them to know about the great hotel rate we got for them as well as about the weekend of events we intend to have. Heck, there are even uninvited people who want our registry info so they can get us a gift! (And no, we haven't registered yet.)

So, what's the problem? Well, there are some people on the guest list that we don't anticipate coming. Particularly some of the relations that we haven't seen in 20 or so years, and are really only inviting because this event is also important to our parents. Our fear is that in sending everyone on the guest list a save-the-date, that some people who wouldn't ordinarily come might start thinking about it and decide to come anyway. Because we're getting married in the awesome city of New Orleans. At a time of year when most of our guests will be starting to have frigid temperatures in their own locations, but we'll probably have very temperate weather. So they might decide to make a little vacation out of it, with the pretext that they're coming for my wedding. And this we do not want.

Though our families realize that not all invited guests will attend, it might cause quite a bit of drama if some people receive an e-mail notification and others do not. Some think we should just send a save-the-date to the A-listers now, and then a second one closer to the wedding. Except for the fact that many A-listers are related to B-listers and they are bound to talk about the wedding and find out that some have received the e-mail while others haven't (as in some are parents-children, or siblings). So then do we exclude A-listers who are likely to talk with the B-listers? Or do we just send the e-mail to everybody and expect that people who wouldn't ordinarily come still won't come just because they've received 7 months notice?

Note: though we're talking A-list and B-list, everyone is on the guest list.

1 comment:

  1. So many people I hoped would not come have RSVP. I don't know if STDs are to blame. I suspect it is more of the idea of ooooooh, family reunion! vacation! But you can't take the invite back once you send it out, so be careful.

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