My fiance and I decided after 9 months of engagement that the normal wedding route won't work for us (he's military, I just started a new job, our families are spread out) and isn't what we want. We want to send out announcements to friends and family to announce our marriage after the fact (coming up in April) rather than have it get out through the grapevine.
My worry is that certain people will interpret this as a way to skip the wedding but get the wedding gifts. Not close family and friends, but people I am not in frequent touch with but are still part of the family. There won't be any gift information on the invitation and we aren't registering, we honestly have everything we need and that's not our motivation. I just don't want people to view it that way. Is it better to skip one great uncle but send one to another and risk someone being slighted? These are people that, if we had a real ceremony, I would invite but really only to avoid leaving someone out and I would be 99.9% certain they would not show up anyways.