Hi, I'm hoping the wise members of this boards can provide some insight. We are having a very non-traditional wedding and I'm not sure how to word the invitations accordingly.
My FI proposed without a ring. We are getting married at my aunt and uncles huge property out in the country. We are having a short (read: 5 minute) wedding ceremony, followed by an informal BBQ and bonfire. We are getting married on Canada Day, and the town fair is not far away so we have a great view for fireworks. They also have a barn and tents in case of bad weather. There won't be a wedding party, flowers, wedding rings, weddings dress or any other wedding stuff. We are getting married in normal clothes, hair, makeup for me etc. We both at a hospital and a chaplain we know from there agreed to marry us. His cousin and cousin's wife are professional photographers and agreed to make sure we get a few shots of all the special moments (although we don't expect them to work the entire night and we want to tell all the guests to bring cameras and take lots of pictures). My uncle plays the fiddle and is in a band and they agreed to play some music and make a playlist with lots of music. Our entire budget is for food and drinks for the BBQ. We are all set for everything except for the invitations.
Herein lies my dilemma. We want to make sure our guests know to dress informal. We also don't want gifts because we have everything we need. If people insist we want to tell them to donate in our name to a charity of their choice. But we are pretty firm that we don't want gifts. The wedding is not until July but we are writing up the invitations ourselves. His sister works from home and gets tons of paper, ink, envelopes and stamps from work and she has graciously agreed to let us print them at her house. So because the invitations are not pre-printed and we need to come up with our own wording. We want our guests to know that 1) the dress is informal, 2) we really insist on no gifts, 3) although we are making our best effort to get the name of everyone's significant others, we don't mind if you bring your girlfriend and her kids, or your teenage daughter and her boyfriend. As long as you write the number attending on the RSVP so we can plan for food, and 4) you are welcome to bring a tent or trailer and stay the night if it's too late to drive home that night.
Can anyone suggestion how we can word the invitations so we can get all this across without breaking etiquette or committing a faux pas? Thank-you so much in advance. This invitation thing is really stressing me out enough. I don't know how all of you manage to plan a whole wedding with all the trimmings, I give you props because I couldn't do it.
(Our building has been have power outages all day, so I might not be able to reply right away. I will keep checking back as long as the power is on)
Edited for spelling. See post below.