Guest list rules to help you keep your wedding small
Friends & Family Advice
Guestpost by
on January 18, 2011
65
Annie's got some solid advice on how to manage a guest list that could easily grow to out of control proportions (especially when you want a small wedding). And keep your eyes peeled, because we'll be bringing you the entire scoop on Annie and Kyle's backyard wedding tomorrow! -Megs
Annie, Kyle and guests. Photo by Taymin Kane.
Our biggest wedding planning challenge was the guest list! From the beginning, Kyle and I knew we wanted to have a fairly small wedding. What we didn't know was exactly how difficult that can be to pull off.
When we started making the guest list we realized that we had two options:
- Give in and invite everyone we know OR
- Invite only immediate family to avoid hurt feelings
Neither of those options represented what we really wanted for our wedding, so we decided to go with a third option…
Could we exclude people we considered to be some of our best friends just a short time ago but now only see once every six months? What about aunts and uncles that hadn't even met our son?
That third option? Painstakingly pour over a list of everyone we consider to be either family or friends, and decide which ones would make the cut. This was especially hard because, in the two years prior to our wedding, both of us had gone through a huge growing period (which included meeting each other, falling madly in love, getting pregnant after just four months together, moving three times and caring for our most fabulous son) and therefore our social circle had changed dramatically.
Could we exclude people we considered to be some of our best friends just a short time ago but now only see once every six months? What about aunts and uncles that hadn't even met our son? All of these people still mean a lot to us, but if they don't know us as a couple, what's the point of them being at our wedding? It was, after all, a day to celebrate our life together. And if we exclude these people that we have known and loved for years, can we really justify inviting people that have only become good friends in a matter of months? There was so so so much to consider!
We ended up coming up with two rules which more or less answered all of our many queries:
- Only people who knew both of us decently well and that one, or both, of us cared about immensely.
- Definitely not anyone that one of us had never met before.
This worked well, both in helping us making decisions, and as a reason to give people when they asked us why so and so wasn't invited.
In the end we ended up with about sixty totally wonderful and important people attending our wedding. Were we happy with how everything went and did we love the intimate feeling this short guest list provided? Absolutely!
Do we hope that people know that just because they weren't invited to our wedding it doesn't mean that we don't love them? For sure.
For more advice re: guest lists, check it out…
What rules are YOU using to help you cut down your guest list?
About Annie
Annie is a stay at home mama and an artist. She and her husband Kyle got married in her parents' backyard in Woodstock, Ontario.
Rozegoddess said
I'm brand new on this site, so hi everyone!
My BF and I live in Austria, but I'm from California. My mom lives in South Carolina, though, and that's where my immediate family is based. We are in very early planning phases, but the basic issue is that we're on a pretty tight budget, and our people are too, but they're in 2 different countries and spread across 2 coasts. I'd like to get married in my mom's backyard in South Carolina (50-75 people max) and then have a big reception in Vienna for the Austrian side. Does that sound reasonable? I don't want to shut my boy's family and friends out, though. Also, if we held it in SC, all of my extended family are in California and I basically have to invite them. However, we're not that close and I doubt that really any of them would come. So I guess these are my questions:
1. Has anyone dealt with international weddings on a budget? Any advice?
2. How do you deal with inviting lots of people who probably won't show up? How do you plan for that?
thanks a bunch for any advice.
best,
RG
Ali_Pali said
Hi RG, I've seen a few brides on the tribe dealing with those issues. Sounds to me like you're far enough in planning that you should join. There are many people with similar situations there. (Your idea sounds reasonable to me!) GL!
Mary said
We got sick of the guest list drama and eloped
Lola said
Our "everyone we know" list was 135. We wanted more like 75. We're from the Midwest but live on the West Coast. Much of the family back home won't be able to make the trip so his parents decided to give us an engagement luncheon back there instead. A lot of people will be going to that instead so that makes for a lot fewer people for us to pay for here. It's not a lot of money for his parents either because a restaurant lunch back home costs a third of what an evening dinner at a banquet hall costs here.
Co-workers: only if we're friends outside of work. That cuts my list to 1.
Kids: local ones can get a babysitter. If the whole family is flying cross-country, then they can come.
+1's: Only if they are coming from out of town and won't know anyone else.
I like the surprise wedding idea.