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My new extended family (circa 1985) * personal photo
My fiance, a second generation Filipino, has a lot more family members than me. A LOT more than me! All of my uncles and aunts do not have children. None of them are even married. I have no immediate cousins. I have one sister. She has one son. In my The Knot wedding guest tracker “The Bride’s Family” is only 14 guests. And this is when everyone who is single brings a date! In short, I have always wanted a huge extended family—now I will be getting one!
So it wasn’t so hard getting my guest list together. However, when you have a large family it is a bit trickier.
How do you decide who comes and who stays? Well, for us, it is based on a) budget, b) relationship, and c) space. We decided to invite his parents siblings (his aunts and uncles) and their children but no one beyond that. No second cousins, or else it would be too huge.
Our venue fits 100 people, and originally we were aiming for 75. Right now our guest list is at 121.
So brides, how did you decide on your guest list? Was it a hard decision?
Being Filipina- I’m in the same boat. I think I will base my decisions on regional preferences to keep the numbers under control. Sounds like your wedding will be a rocking party!
My fiance is also Filipina. We opted to have a destination wedding in Vermont (we are both from Cali) to try to avoid some of the awkward guest list moments. Her family takes things very personally when they are not invited to things. And it is neither in our budget or in our wedding vision to have a giant wedding. I totally understand how tough it is to cut it down. Just do your best.
The guest list is the one detail I have cried over so far. So has my mom. It is the one thing she and I have fought over. Our first list came out to 225. Our venue fits 150. My family is HUGE and figuring out how to make cuts has been so painful. But we cannot fit (or afford) to invite everyone.
I am dreading this. My family is pretty large. But my SO’s is HUGE (both parents have 7 siblings EACH!) I honestly don’t know how we are going to do this. I am interested in what other bees will say.
You are like my FH with his friends & fam & there dates he is inviting 16 people! On the other hand my aunts, uncles & adult cuz I have over 30!
I am hoping for about 65 people.
We did something similar to you. We both have fairly large families, so by inviting our families alone we already have a pretty good sized wedding. We invited all our aunts and uncles and most of our first cousins (I did omit a few that are much older than me, I’m not close to, and I don’t think would come) but no first cousins once removed and no second cousins. That last one was hard–there are some of my second cousins that I really love, but I wanted to be fair. I think it’s much easier for people will smaller families to have smaller weddings!
oh i know how you feel about that. extended family’s “cousins” that aren’t really cousins. i completely understand. but i think you guys should really decide who is important. i told my husband that if you haven;t talked to them or seen them in a year then we are not inviting them.
I cried this morning over this. Between myself and fiance…..we invited 50 people. 50!!! My mom and dad are divorced…but my mom invited 35 and my dad 10. Then step in Futuremotherinlawzilla!!!! ummm our list was 363 people!!!!! we wanted 150 tops! She is paying for 0 and expects us to pay and be ok with her list.
I hear ya, I’m half Filipino. We’ve got “cousins” and “aunts” and all kinds of people coming; people I’m not related to, but people I called family nonetheless growing up.
Thankfully, Mr. Taco also comes from Catholic stock, so his extended family is fairly large, too.
Congratulations on marrying into a Filipino family… they will bring love and anarchy in equal quantities, and you will love it!
One option to consider, if you are having a gazillion guests and no budget to feed them, is to make it a pot luck wedding. Ask everyone to bring a dish, so you save yourself money. If there’s one thing Filipino families are great at, it’s bringing food to family gatherings!
Bbut to keep them extra sweet, you could also do a roast pig, or “lechon”.
Or you could have your wedding in several stages, for smaller/ bigger numbers. Eg small ceremony for 50 people, dinner for 100, and dancing party afterwards for 180 or so. That way everyone, including colleagues, second cousins etc can feel part of the fun.
Furthermore, the guest list was one of the hardest things. I’m ultimately happy with where it is, but we would have liked room to invite a couple more people if space allowed.
Guest lists are so difficult! I am the one with a huge family, and it was really difficult deciding who we could invite and who had to be left out!
@ Miss Pashmina, can I ask how you and your family feel about accounting for so much less than half of the wedding guest list? I ask b/c I’m in a similar boat (my family is tiny, my FI’s is huge), and I get kind of sad thinking that our wedding might be 25% my guests, 75% his. (And my mom is DEF not cool with that!). But then I want to be fair, so I don’t really feel right saying to my FI “okay, you can only invite the first cousins you’re really close to, whereas I can invite anyone I/ my parents are remotely close to at all.” I’m not very far along in planning so we haven’t really tackled this yet, but this is one aspect of wedding planning I am soooo not looking forward to!
Oh I know! Guest list has been and I’m sure will be the trickiest part for us! We both come from huge immediate families and GINORMOUS extended families! Most likely only siblings, aunts & uncles, and cousins will make the cut. Which is unfortunate because I am close with some of my 2nd or 3rd (or maybe once removed?) cousins but not others. Where do you draw the line?
What will you do if people show up who are not invited?? My fiance is Samoan and this is very common at their weddings. His cousin invited 300 people to her wedding and 500 showed up. I DO NOT want this to happen at my wedding. 
I don’t want people uncomfortable and having to stand up…
FI’s family is at about 20 and mine is currently 111. we’re not counting friends here–just the absolutely necessary family. i have decided that i don’t care–everyone on those lists is invited. i will figure it out when it comes to budgeting. i’d rather make my own invites than cut out some of my family.
Yikes, that’s a toughie! No advice here, just wishing you luck!
I assigned distances to relationships:
Us = 0
Parent/sibling = 1
Grandparent/aunt/uncle/cousin = 2
and so on. Let’s call them orbitals for short.
In the first and second orbitals, his side was way more populous than mine. When we got out to the third, it evened out. Had we gone to the fourth, it would have gotten entirely out of hand–the guest list would more than double. So on paper, it’s very clear: stop at 3.
The problem is, while my 4th-orbital relatives were like “cool, here’s a card, glad we don’t have to fly out there” (and we didn’t hear a peep from his 4th-orbital relatives) his 3rd-orbital relatives were all up in arms because their nieces or second cousins weren’t going to be invited, and his parents were just scandalized. Scandalized! How could you not invite these people you’ve never heard of, that we never mention, that we can’t accurately chart your relationship to without a computer model?!
When that happened, we showed them the list. Here is what it looks like to the third orbital. And here is what it looks like to the fourth. Do you see how that number of people will not fit? And do you see that if you invite one portion of the orbital without inviting the entire orbital, you will offend more people than you will if you invite none of them?
My one bridezilla moment, the moment where I yelled “it’s my [expletive] wedding,” was about this.
@Salsals: At the beginning we kept it pretty much even in terms of relationship. My FI had a much bigger invite list than us. But then as things sorta came together it dawned on me that even though my parents dont have huge families they have friends that act as their families. So inviting them made sense. I did invite a few more of my own casual friends and I even some of my co-workers–he didn’t. At first I thought that it would be bad to do but no one raised a stink about it. I think the thing that worked the best was telling my FI’s mom that she could only invite 4 of her friends becuase originally she wanted to invite 20 of them–which would be more than I could invite for myself and that didnt seem right! So thank goodness things are working out. I had one more space left after the latest declines and so invited one more friend of my mother in law to be’s. Which is making her happier.
our venue says it holds about 140 ppl, but i think that’s if you want them stuffed in liek sausages. We decided on 80ppl, and was able to keep that number and still invite everyone we wanted to…until the FMIL came up to visit for the summer…now our list is at 90 and counting. I decided that I will allow her to invite more ppl (as my FI has a larger fam than mine) but i will shut her down once it hits 100ppl. i dont want the venue to be overcrowded and my FI and i are paying for this shindig. i recommend sticking as closey to your plan as possible, it will only cause you stress in the end
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Mrs. Pashmina, NYC/Catalina Island, CA Age and Occupation: 28, Arts Education Fiance's Age and Occupation: 34, IT Administrator Engagement Date: April 26th, 2009 Wedding Date: July 2010 Venue: Catalina Country Club, Catalina Island, California About Me: I'm a laid-back Cali girl who moved to NYC for school, and ended up staying for love. My fiance is a quick-witted Jersey boy, a self-proclaimed Foodie and the funniest man I've ever met. Together we love exploring the city streets embarking on our next misadventure---and yes, this often involves eating off food carts and trying "the next big thing". I'm the girl in the sundress, snapping photos and collecting trinkets of memorabilia along the way. As a girly girl at heart, I am excited about our romantic natural island wedding incorporating our American & Filipino traditions.
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