I have been working on guest lists for our wedding, the rehearsal dinner, etc, and it's getting out of hand. I wanted to have a rehearsal dinner that included anyone who is a part of the rehearsal and their spouses/children, plus ourselves, which is what i've been told is the norm. That put us at 30 people invited to this thing, not including us, and that would mean almost half our guest list is invited to this thing. Yikes. But then we realized we'd like to do something for our out of town guests, because we wanted to thank them for coming and spend more time with them than the few minutes we'll have at the wedding. Unfortunately, THAT would mean inviting 95% of our guest list, or about 58 people not including ourselves. We absolutely cannot afford that!
Does someone have any ideas about how we can make these things more affordable? We considered having the rehearsal be in my church community hall or the park, and just serve pizza and stuff, but even that's going to be tough to pull off with such a tight budget. I've heard of inviting all the guests from out of town to the rehearsal dinner but that would be even worse. I don't know when or how we're going to have time to spend with our out of town guests outside of the wedding and I feel really bad for this. Any ideas?