Hello Everyone,
I am not an official bridesmaid (there is only 1 MOH in the bridal party), but I am helping out in planning the Shower/Bachelorette. We have a few issues and I would like some advice. This will probably be long -sorry in advance for that. The bridal party are all in their 40s, so the bride is not into having a pub crawl/bar hopping bachelorette party. She also is someone who doesn't want to put anyone out (in terms of having them do a lot of work). Originally, she said she didn't even want a shower, just a nice day with her friends for a bachelorette party. We all live in Boston, but I was thinking we could do a wine tasting in the afternoon, along the wine trail in Rhode Island and then we could try to do a short sailing cruise in the early evening in Newport, before going out to a nice dinner. We may or may not stay overnight. There are about 13 or so people on the invite list for the b. party; however, about 5 of them are out of state, so in actuality, there will probably only be 7 or 8 of us that can actually go. The more I've spoken with the bride, the more she has kind of let on that she probably would enjoy a shower as well. So then I thought we should combine it into the same day (even though the wedding isn't until Sept, we have very limited days to do it, due to several other schedule conflicts, such as other out of town weddings, etc we are all involved with). So, I thought, okay, after the midday wine tasting, we can have a nice lunch somewhere and each give her a gift and that will be the 'shower' part.
The real problem is both her and her fiance's family all live several states away and they have no intention of throwing her a shower at all and I highly doubt that any of them would come to the shower (including her mother). I'm not entirely sure why her mother isn't more involved, but she's not. So, my question is, do we invite her mother, grandmother, and the groom's mother (who definitely won't be coming, and probably won't make it the actual wedding either, due to health issues, etc) anyway even though they won't probably come? If we invite them, do we then invite all the aunts/cousins, etc who also probably won't come? And what do we do if they do want to come to the shower, but not the bachelorette? We will be out of town, so where do we put them? I want to invite at least the Mom, grandma, and mother of the groom, but where is the cutoff point? I certainly don't want to be rude and leave someone out. Should we just keep it to a friend of the bride shower and bachelorette party and let her family figure out if they are going to do their own shower (although I'm 95% sure they won't).
If you have any ideas or suggestions, please let me know. Also, I'm also looking for cute decorating ideas. The bride isn't really into they typical pink and black Bach. Decorations. Thank you!!!