Weddingbee Blog

I had a terrible, crazy time addressing our invitations. I tried to address all of them in one sitting, handwritten calligraphy and all. Please DO NOT do what I did. There was really no reason for the crunch. I ordered the envelopes separately, so even though I was waiting on our invitations, I had the envelopes to address for at least a two days ahead of time. But I didn’t think. Learn from me: When you rush, mistakes happen. But this is what happened…

I went over the invite list again and again in my head, on paper, and with Mr. P. All of the people were included. I went over the invites with Mr. Pash’s parents and my own parents to make sure everyone was on the list. I tried my best to ensure that everyone’s names were spelled correctly, and I stalked people on Facebook to make sure. I was pretty sure everyone was on our list and I even had the significant others’ names down.

But we left someone’s name off the list. No one caught it! No one…although, as the bride, I do take responsibility for it.

From the get-go I decided that we were not going to have an outer and an inner envelope. We didn’t have any hard edges that could get caught in the mail and our invitations were not extremely formal. I would name all the people on the envelope that would be invited so we would avoid any confusion that may occur. I decided that I would include the kids’ names too on the envelope or if there were too many I would simply write the parents’ names and then write, “and family,” hoping that it would be clear that only the family that resided at the residence were included.

My error: Mr. Pashmina has a half brother that he first met when he was 14 years old. The half brother is 6 years older and lived in the Philippines until this moment when he came to live with Mr. P and his newly found family. As a 14-year-old and a 20-year-old, they were the dynamic duo, having oodles of fun together being the best of friends. Mr. P’s half brother married a woman who was older than he who already had a daughter from a previous marriage. The two of them had a son, and the two siblings are about 10 years apart.

At the time of the invitation I had only seen his half brother twice in the last four years. He came to many more family parties, and invited us to more things within the two years before so I felt I knew him pretty well. In the six years I had been with Mr. Pashmina I never met the wife’s daughter from the previous marriage. She is just a few years younger than I am and lived in NYC. When I first started attending Mr. Pash’s family parities I was interested in meeting her. But then over the last few years I basically forgot about her…which is terrible to say, but true. Ultimately, she was the one that we forgot to include on our guest list. Our invitation listed the mom, dad, and son but not the daughter on the envelope. Uh-oh!

Once the invitations got sent out I got a call from Mr. P saying that his mom got a call from his brother and that the wife was pissed. We didn’t invite the daughter to the wedding. I told Mr. Pash to call up his brother and say of course she is invited and to apologize. Later that day I texted him, replying to a message I got a while back, which said, “So sorry for overlooking X. I hope you all can attend!” I never got a reply. Mr. Pashmina just left a message. Then we never got an RSVP back, declining or not…

So, let this lesson teach ya! Make sure those overlooked people make it on your guest list. As the bride, people will ultimately blame you when things go wrong, and praise you when things go right. I’ll leave you to guess if they actually attended or if we have heard from them since…

Have you been shunned for forgetting to invite someone?