Guest List

           In the last post, I talked about creating a guest list but did not give any good guidance or help which I intend to correct in this post. Most of your budget goes toward paying for the venue and paying for your guests, so it is important you not waste that money on people you do not want at your wedding and reception. The best advice I can give you is to sit down with your fiancée and hammer out a list of the major groups of people you would like to have at your wedding. We ended up with family, extended family, church members, family friends and our friends as our major groups. Once we had that number, we compared that to the capacity of the venue we booked and our guest count was below the capacity of the venue, so we had some extra places we could fill. Getting the list together is a tough job and my fiancée and I have had to sit down with both sets of parents, our friends, and just us at least eight to ten times to get the list to where we have it now. Everyone and every wedding are different so I cannot give you any specific guidelines but I can tell you that this step can be fun, but you have to make it so.

               

            I would recommend starting the list with your immediate family and wedding party first, and then moving on to extended family and everyone else. It seems obvious but sometimes it is easier to think of friends and extended family that you would like to invite. If you forget a family member, feelings are definitely going to be hurt. Once you have your family listed out, move on and speak honestly and earnestly with each other about who you want to come. I can guarantee you one thing: not everyone you both want can be invited. Everyone involved in our wedding has had to make sacrifices and most of them boiled down to co-workers we would have liked to invite but could not. Another important tip is make sure that everyone is sharing the hurt of not getting to invite someone. There is nothing more unfair or hurtful than someone telling you that you must make all the sacrifices.

Call or speak to those people you cannot invite and let them know you would have liked them to come but you just do not have the budget to invite everyone. We have had problems with this through the whole process. We have many church friends that we wanted to come but we had to settle for telling them they are welcome to come to the ceremony. We will not have room at the reception for them however, because we are trying to keep the reception for family and close family friends. You may want to consider inviting people to the ceremony site because it can usually hold more people and you do not have to pay per person to attend the ceremony. After all, the ceremony is the actual union and the reception is just a celebration of that union.

It’s not all doom and gloom though! You are picking people to share your special day with you. Those people who have watched you grow up, grew up with you, shared a special moment, or just have always been nice all have a place at your wedding. Make a couple of passes over your list to make sure that everyone coming is really someone you want to come for you or your fiancée’s sake.