My daughter is getting married in November. We are just getting together a tentative list of guests right now. The groom's mom sent their list to him a couple weeks ago, and we asked him quickly how many were on it. He said about 100, so we thought it was perfect. The plan for the wedding is 200-250 guests.
Fast forward to time for STD's to be addressed, and we found out that list of 100 is really 269! My daughter has tried to explain to him that 269 is way too many people, and he just keeps saying that they won't all come. Obviously, we have to assume 100% attendance until RSVP's come back. 2 weeks before the wedding is too late to know whether we are having 400 people or 200!
We love her FI and his family, so we don't want to offend them by saying they can't have all these people. I suspect that weddings might be a little different in their area than they are here. This is a sit down dinner reception, where they might be more used to open house type events. They also have a huge extended family, where ours is rather small. Going through their list, though, he admits that he doesn't know some of the people. In some cases, he doesn't even know if they are family or friends.
My #1 opinion is that if neither the bride nor the groom know you, you should not be at their wedding. We are looking at the best way to approach this. Would you say to just give them a number to trim the list down to? Not knowing their family politics or
how close they are to great aunt Hilda as opposed to their neighborhood paperboy, we kind of hate to say "no kids of friends" or "nothing beyond 1st cousins." We would much rather let them pick whom to cross off using whichever system they want.