Confessions of a wedding etiquette nature

Casadena · April 2015

Don't hate me......but we totally B-listed. To be fair, we didn't have any idea this wasn't a thing, until I found these boards AFTER our wedding.

flbride2015 · April 2015

I totally wanted to have a PPD before I found these forums because "duh, all military brides do it" and because "benefits!" Thank you Knotties for saving me from that one.

I addressed some of our save-the-dates with "XYZ Family" because we have friends and family with a ton of kids each, and I was too lazy to write out each and every kid's name. I sort of still want to do this on the invites too...

Not really an etiquette issue, but our wedding is on a Sunday evening in a not so convenient location. I'm regretting this one still but it's too late to change.

CMGragain · April 2015

Yes, ME!

Two weeks before the daughter's wedding, one of her co-teachers got down on his knees in front of her and begged her to let him come to the wedding. There were a few others, too. I sent them a B-list invitation. I'm not even sorry!

ashley8918 · April 2015

CMGragain said:
Yes, ME!

Two weeks before the daughter's wedding, one of her co-teachers got down on his knees in front of her and begged her to let him come to the wedding. There were a few others, too. I sent them a B-list invitation. I'm not even sorry!

Um... He what? This is really fucking weird. Who does that?

louxnoelle · April 2015

ElcaB said:
I'll play:

Also, we cut a white cake but served cheesecake for dessert. I know everyone is against this but we did it for [insert list of reasons here] and I have zero regret. I'd still endorse it for other brides, too!

Forgive my ignorance, but I don't quite understand this one? Maybe because I prefer cheesecake to white cake so I'd be stoked, haha.

larrygaga · April 2015

CMGragain said:
Yes, ME!

Two weeks before the daughter's wedding, one of her co-teachers got down on his knees in front of her and begged her to let him come to the wedding. There were a few others, too. I sent them a B-list invitation. I'm not even sorry!

kao2015 · April 2015

I put "black tie" on part of the invitation suite. The main invite sat in a frame, and when you lifted up the invite, there was a gold backing that had "dinner and dancing to follow" and "Black tie" printed on it. So it wasn't super obvious, but I still felt crazy terrible about it. It was just a battle I lost with H and the ILs. I did try to spread the memo through word of mouth that we didn't actually care what people wore, especially for men who had black suits and asked if that would be okay versus a tux. I told them I gave zero fucks. I will say that a surprising number of people in our age group (especially the women) seemed to really like that they had an excuse to get all fancy. This would not be true for everyone's peers though, and it was still rude, so I still regret it and would advise people to not have a dress code.

anjemon · April 2015

So I'm only a few days out, perhaps I'll learn of something major in the days to come. But I know we:

- Invited a guest around 2 weeks before the wedding. He is a friend of H's who got added to the Bachelor party by the BM (I think, I don't really know how he ended up showing up). And really drunk H invited him to the wedding. I figured at that point the nicest thing I could do was invite him, so he got a paper invitation hand delivered by H that week.

- Sent our invitations out early. We had to have our numbers in three weeks before the date, so we were going to send them out at the beginning of the invitation window. But I think I sent them out 11 or 10 weeks before. It mostly happened because I was so excited to have them done I just dumped them in the mail without thinking.

- We sent invitations for some of H's cousins to their parent's homes. I was told these addresses were too hard to get and the parents would make sure they RSVP'd in a timely manner. They were probably right.

- I also feel bad about being a little short with my family. They were trying to fit in some pictures when we were supposed to be starting our first dance. I snapped at them a little because we were already running later than I wanted and I was afraid people would start leaving because the dance hadn't started. In retrospect, I wish I would have taken the short amount of time to finish things. Oh well.

And I live in fear that I missed thanking someone. I've gone over the tables in my head and I think we talked to everyone, but I'm worried I just saw them and didn't really get a chance to say thank you.

CMGragain · April 2015

ashley8918 said:

CMGragain said:
Yes, ME!

Two weeks before the daughter's wedding, one of her co-teachers got down on his knees in front of her and begged her to let him come to the wedding. There were a few others, too. I sent them a B-list invitation. I'm not even sorry!
Um... He what? This is really fucking weird. Who does that?

Yes, I thought so, too, but I'm glad we decided to let him come. He was an orthodox Jewish man, and he was fascinated to see a church wedding. They shared the same classroom and team taught together, but daughter was afraid that if she invited him, all the other teachers would expect an invitation, too.

climbingsingle · April 2015

CMGragain said:

ashley8918 said:

CMGragain said:
Yes, ME!

Two weeks before the daughter's wedding, one of her co-teachers got down on his knees in front of her and begged her to let him come to the wedding. There were a few others, too. I sent them a B-list invitation. I'm not even sorry!
Um... He what? This is really fucking weird. Who does that?

Yes, I thought so, too, but I'm glad we decided to let him come. He was an orthodox Jewish man, and he was fascinated to see a church wedding. They shared the same classroom and team taught together, but daughter was afraid that if she invited him, all the other teachers would expect an invitation, too.

Wow! You are such an amazing person for letting this Jewish man experience a church wedding! You are going to heaven for reals! Hooray!

Blergbot · April 2015

We over-invited for the venue. It was in SIL's backyard, so the only thing we had to go on is that she'd had a cocktail party with 60 people and it was fine. We asked the caterer if we could fit everyone if we had 100% attendance. He claimed that we could. What he didn't tell us is that he was imagining people standing for the ceremony. I have no idea what we would have done if everyone had come, but we got lucky and there was room for everyone to be seated for the ceremony and dinner. Cocktail hour was without seating, but the dinner area was available for people to sit.

We threw ourselves an engagement party--that was before I lurked on these boards, and it was really just a Halloween party. When we got engaged right before the party we put Halloween & Engagement Party on the invite. We also put No Gifts, Please. Oh well. One couple who came had a potluck wedding, and another had a 3-wedding PPD.

Our DOC turned our ceremony into an Unplugged Ceremony without running it by me first. I was lined up to enter inside the house, so the only reason I even knew was when one guest commented on what a great idea it was. I'm sure at least one person rolled their eyes...

FiancB · April 2015

Ummmm that's really weird. Not that I'd beg to go to anyone's wedding, but I'm pretty sure begging to see a wedding because it's a different religion like it's some spectacle would be offensive to most people. Like I bet Indian weddings are super cool but I'm not going to call up my old roommate from 10 years ago upon finding out she's getting married and beg her to let me go because she's Indian.

Anyway.

I had a few "and guest"s. In my defense, this was for singles that I wanted to allow to bring a date or friend with, so I felt like I was being pretty nice for that. Most of our friend are in serious relationships if not married, so I didn't want the few singles to feel left out or awkwardly alone. Surprisingly, not many took up the offer so I still didn't have a bunch of random people there.

CMGragain · April 2015

He wanted to come to the wedding because he cared about daughter. We didn't know it was his first Christian church wedding until later. Many of daughter's friends had never seen a church wedding before, either. I was surprised.
I think he was probably disappointed. Our reception was tame compared to the Jewish wedding receptions I have attended.

huskypuppy14 · April 2015

FiancB said:
Ummmm that's really weird. Not that I'd beg to go to anyone's wedding, but I'm pretty sure begging to see a wedding because it's a different religion like it's some spectacle would be offensive to most people. Like I bet Indian weddings are super cool but I'm not going to call up my old roommate from 10 years ago upon finding out she's getting married and beg her to let me go because she's Indian.

Anyway.

I had a few "and guest"s. In my defense, this was for singles that I wanted to allow to bring a date or friend with, so I felt like I was being pretty nice for that. Most of our friend are in serious relationships if not married, so I didn't want the few singles to feel left out or awkwardly alone. Surprisingly, not many took up the offer so I still didn't have a bunch of random people there.

You're allowed to do "and guest" for truly single people.

We did a few "and Family" on our invitations. One of them was extended relatives of my husband and I didn't have all their names even after asking MIL multiple times. I sent the invitation with the expectation that whoever RSVP'd from that family would be fine with us. No one from that family came anyway (they lived out of the country). I felt bad, but I did the best I could with the information I had.

Another "and Family" was my uncle's family. He has three kids, and the oldest had just turned 18 and was still in HS. I figured this was borderline.

lnixon8 · April 2015

I couldn't get enough hotel rooms for every out of town guest so I texted my VIPs before invites went out and told them to book ASAP. Wedding is June 20th, I've been cringing over this since July when the local hotels refused to give me more than 10 rooms each.

ElcaB · April 2015

louxnoelle said:

ElcaB said:
I'll play:

Also, we cut a white cake but served cheesecake for dessert. I know everyone is against this but we did it for [insert list of reasons here] and I have zero regret. I'd still endorse it for other brides, too!
Forgive my ignorance, but I don't quite understand this one? Maybe because I prefer cheesecake to white cake so I'd be stoked, haha.

@louxnoelle, apparently etiquette dictates you shouldn't eat/cut anything not also being served to your guests, so this is a rule-breaker. I agree with you, cheesecake > cake!

swiftsticks · April 2015

lolo883 said:

swiftsticks said:
Our invitations do not include a map of the ceremony location and reception location.
We have a 30 minute gap, which is travel time between the two locations
Due to the size of the wedding we're only giving+1's to non married guests that are in relationships. There are many people who are invited alone since they're not dating anyone (I've checked).
We haven't sent out our invitations yet...it's 7.5 weeks away and people are starting to ask. We're held up because FI is making a website and is developing QR codes to make a unique login for each invitee. This means they can RSVP online and the website is only accessible to those invited. I didn't want our wedding website to come up on google when you search my name.
The bolded are not etiquette violations at all.

The last one... seriously?? Nobody uses QR codes. Trust me, I work in digital analytics and people DON'T use them, most people don't even have a reader downloaded. He's wasting his time. Please consult this helpful flow chart.

ARG!! I KNOW! He's a software developer and making this website is his thing. I never use QR codes and I don't know anyone who does. This wasn't a hill I was willing to die on.

Thanks for confirming that the other stuff was okay. I was a little worried about the gap and the maps.

theartistformerlyknownas · April 2015

@swiftsticks I hope he's going to be the one calling all the people who didn't RSVP to confirm whether they're coming or not.

swiftsticks · April 2015

We have RSVP cards with the (unmailed, as of today) invitations, which I'm betting most people will use.

I'll let you know how many people actually use the QR code for the website (if any). I think he's also including unique logins for people who don't have QR readers. I don't think that info will be used either.

flantastic · April 2015

swiftsticks said:
We have RSVP cards with the (unmailed, as of today) invitations, which I'm betting most people will use.

I'll let you know how many people actually use the QR code for the website (if any). I think he's also including unique logins for people who don't have QR readers. I don't think that info will be used either.

This sounds like way more trouble than paper RSVPs. Reinventing the wheel: unnecessary.

flyingfoxes · April 2015

It hailed and stormed like crazy the morning of the wedding, so we had to move our ceremony indoors. This meant that the room had to be flipped afterwards for the reception, so there wasn't much cocktail hour seating throughout the building. Luckily it stopped raining so people were able to migrate outside and didn't seem to mind much while we took photos.

I also got a little bit snippy with a couple of people who decided to ask 3 days before the wedding if they could either bring a date, or their 2 grown kids. I told both yes (actually the only thing I told them both was that their tables would be tight with the additional chairs needed to accommodate extras - not really snippy), and one of them didn't show up at all. People are crazy!

spglsp · April 2015

littlepep said:
FI and his parents REFUSED to ask this family friend what her boyfriend's name was so I had to write "and guest". It made me cringe and sad inside

Are his parents my parents? Why am I having this problem?

As for the etiquette confession: I swapped in a bridesmaid when one dropped out really early on (scheduling conflicts), I'm using a registry aggregator (not the kind that sends cash, the kind that directs guests to items at different stores), I'm having two bridal showers (in different states with entirely different guest lists), and one of my bridesmaids is getting a robe for a gift (I really think she'd love it)

Confessions of a wedding etiquette nature

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