Wedding Blog
Hand cancelling may turn out to be one of the bigger mistakes in wedding planning.
Now before I go off on the USPS sham of hand cancelling, I must first apologize to my numerous few readers. I have been so busy wrapping up the odds and ends of wedding planning that it has consumed all of my time. I am now in the single digit countdown until the wedding which means, of course, that I’ve gone bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.
OK, so hand cancelling…I did what most meticulous brides do. I went to the post office with my hands full of wedding invitations and asked if they could be hand cancelled. Some post offices will stamp them for you. Some will let you stamp them yourself. My post office just took them, put a note that said “hand cancel” on them, and said they’d be going to the main branch of the post office downtown as such. Fine, no probs.
Mr. Pearl and I have been running around trying to track down the last of our wayward RSVPers since our guarantee is due to the hotel on Tuesday. We find out now that a bunch of people didn’t receive invitations! In fact, it was one group that all got sent out together and the only thing that we think can explain this is the whole hand cancelling thing. One or two invitations wouldn’t cause alarm. but we have come across at least 5 from that one batch that weren’t received or were received about 2-3 weeks after being sent.
*sigh*
I now know why they call it “going postal.”
|
Share this post: Bane of My Existence
Aww that sucks. Hopefully you won’t find anymore missing ones. Good luck on the big day!
So many brides talk about hand canceling their invites… what is the difference? Besides, obviously, having it done by hand instead of a machine. But are there major visible differences to the extent that it ruins the look of the envelope? I was just going to drop mine off in the mailbox outside the post office… apparently I have a lot to learn!
what Julie said! I was wondering the same thing!
Julie…same here. I have never even heard of hand cancelling. I hope I am not missing something as I’m planning on dropping mine off at the post office.
I had mine hand cancelled because of the wax seals on the back of the envelope. Otherwise it would be a risk that it gets messed up in the machine.
You poor dear! Sometimes, no matter how much planning you do you’re often at the mercy of people who just don’t care. You’ll straighten it out. Good luck! 
Can somebody please explain to me what hand canceling is? I have never heard of it before
I’m so sorry, Miss Pearl. The calligraphy on your envelopes is beautiful, though! Did you do that yourself? Or hire someone?
yes, if you’re sending your invites out in anything other than a normal standard size envelope sealed in a standard fashion, you might want to consider hand cancelling. if it goes through the machines, any special treatment may get ruined. like with jayma’s wax seals, it may come undone or just get stuck in the machine.
i’m sending mine in little boxes, so it’ll totally have to be hand cancelled as i don’t think it’ll even fit in the machine.
sooo sorry about the stinking post office. i think it’s nicer sometimes to just live in a smaller city where they bend rules a little and let you hand cancel it yourself.
I’m so sorry this happened. If you’re certain it’s not a problem with the amount of postage, or a grumpy post office (I actually mailed ours from an adjacent zip code, because the people in our neighborhood post office tend to be . . . well, rather inattentive), I’d make the same assumption about hand cancelling being the culprit.
What’s weird to me is all of ours were hand-cancelled without us requesting it - because our pocketfolds were more than 1/4″ thick (so they wouldn’t go through the machine readers). But, as far as I’ve been able to discover, everyone received their invitations within three or four days of the day they went in the mail (which astonished me, honestly, because I was afraid that at least some of the delivery people would be annoyed with reading the calligraphy
Ok everyone keeps asking and I don’t see a response on here…but isn’t hand cancelling when the post office will personally stamp it for you since many wedding invites are too big or bulky to run through the machines?
Someone correct me if I’m wrong! 
At least the calligraphy is gorgeous!
Here’s a link to Mrs. Spider explaining the difference between machine and HAND cancelling:
http://www.weddingbee.com/2006/08/05/wait-a-minute-mr-postman/
My good friend from high school got married a few years ago, and I never received an invitation. I know I was invited - I was in the wedding party!
I didn’t bother having my invitations hand cancelled, though. Both our fathers worked at the Post Office for years, and I don’t feel like it adds anything - especially since my invitations were not at all fragile.
margo, same thing happened to me though i wasn’t in the party. i called since our other friends got theirs and asked if i still had to come. good laugh at the time. weirder since my invite was at the top of their pile!
The nightmares of hand-canceling just keep recurring on this website.
It’s the post office’s way to convince us not to bother! I took mine to be hand-canceled, and they lied to my face as they took them from my hands. Next day people started receiving them, and they all were machine canceled with “HAPPY HOLIDAYS” and Shrek or something dreadful and non-bridal-like.
I put mine straight into the post office drop box, and they made it safe and sound to every one of my invitees.
Your invites will still go through other sorting machines, so hand cancelling will only take off one step. Not worth it, IMO.
your many readers have come out to play ;).
i sent mine regular, made sure they weren’t lumpy, in a regular sized envelope, and under 1 oz., and a bunch still got lost. boo to usps!
I feel your pain. I had 14 invites mangled by the post office. They were so badly damaged that you could not read the outgoing address. So, they ended up back in my mailbox. I had to re-address and re-send them. Now I have a bunch of friends and family who think they are on the “B” invite list because they got their invite so late.
I have to say, if I were to do it all over again, I wouldn’t waste my time with the hand-cancelling (especially as it has made my life harder).
Jess, the above envelope isn’t mine, just a pic from Google images…I wish I was that talented!
Hand cancelling is that nice circle with the date and USPS that is shown in the picture above. It is “cancelling” because they put the stamp on top of the postage stamp so that you cannot reuse the postage stamp.
If you do not request hand cancelling, they will just run your invitations through the machine and you will get whatever stamp they are using at that time. Most of the time, I think it is those awful wavy lines however, during holiday times, I think they do have some picture like a snowman which I doubt you would want on your wedding invitations.
If you have any type of bump on your invitation, you may want to request hand cancelling or your invitations may get mangled when they run it through the machine.
I just went through the good and the bad of the hand cancel. I drove all the way out to the nice little post office that months ago promised they will always hand cancel and were so nice about it. Then I finally bring in my invitations today and the SAME guy rudely told me that NO ONE hand cancels anymore. I then inform,ed him that I was just told in a neighboring town’s p.o. that they do and that he himself had and he told me to take it there.
I thne went to my post office and said ‘if I do it,’ can I hand cancel they said “go to town” and that I did. I actually preferred doing it myself, because I know it is done!
How Frustrating! I put all that time into typing, stuffing, and addressing my wedding invitations, not to mention the $100 I spent on stamps, and several of the VIP guests on my list didn’t receive their invitations. Now, these people think that their not invited, and my fiance’s mom keeps calling saying so and so didn’t get an invitation, and I get accused of never mailing them! What happens to this undelivered mail? I wonder if it’s sitting in the guests’ neighbors mail box. I know that I very often get my neighbors mail. That makes me feel really good about sending my bills and checks in the mail - thank god for e-payments.
| Visit our sister sites | Project Wedding Wedding Songs |
eHarmony Advice Dating Advice |
JustMommies Pregnancy Calendar |
Fertile Thoughts Infertility Support |
Mrs. Pearl, Los Angeles
Age and Occupation: 26, High school history teacher
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 37, Software engineer
Engagement Date: No official date, we just decided :-)
Wedding Date: July 2007
Venue: St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Church, Ritz Carlton Huntington Hotel
About Me: Mr. Pearl and I have been together for about four and a half years now. We've been "engaged" since 2004 and were originally supposed to get married in June 2006, but postponed the wedding to July 2007. I love shopping for housewares and office supplies, music, reading chick lit, football, and the diverse world of Los Angeles dining.
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 |
Latest Gallery Pics