Another Christmas has come and gone…I say it every year, but seriously—how fast does time seem to be disappearing? I hope your holiday season was filed with sunshine and rainbows, and that you got to spend it with loved ones. Mr. Jaguar and I used our time spent with family this year to try and nut out some more wedding related details; some being fun to chat about, and some being just plain awkward.
You see, the next big task that we’ve turned our attention towards is the guest list: tricky at the best of times, but no more so than when it comes to family. One of the first things we promised ourselves when we started seriously planning the wedding was that we would be as consistent as we possibly could—meaning that whatever decision we made for one side of the family, we would try and follow through with the other. Sometimes though, that is easier said than done. We’ve learned the hard way that you just can’t please everyone.
If I had to sum up my expression here, I would go with this: “I’m trying to be a super efficient wedding planner that doesn’t step on anyone’s toes, but in actual fact I’m living in my parents’ old bedroom and I can’t find any of my socks, so eh, what can you do?’
{Side note: Also, yes, the Jaguars are still living apart after our move back home to Sydney, earlier this month. He’s at his parents’ place and I’m at mine. It’s just like old times! We’re also still awaiting our shipping boxes from the UK, so are both living out of the same travel suitcases that we arrived with: so not fun! Luckily, we’ve got a new apartment to move into come January 7th, and it can’t come soon enough.}
Now…back to the family stuff.
We decided early on that we wanted to keep our numbers small, so we made the fairly painless decision on the kids vs. no kids debate. For numbers and space reasons, we chose the latter. I’ve spread the word over the last twelve months that our wedding will be adults only and will be wording our invitations pretty carefully. So far so good, though I can see there being some comments made in the future; but eh, it’s our choice.
That topic was pretty easy for us to decide on. The hardest part has been trying to figure out how to keep things consistent when it comes to our ‘grown up’ family members.
Let’s look at direct family first, starting with our aunts and uncles. Between us, Mr. Jaguar and I have 20 pairs of them. While we’re not close to all of them, for the sake of our sanity (and to avoid being ripped to pieces by irate grandparents wondering why so-and-so didn’t get an invite when so-and-so did get one), they’re all going to be receiving invites. Easy peasy. But if you go one step further down the family-chain, you get the cousins. And hoo boy, do we have a lot of cousins between us.
My side of the family is fairly straightforward: I have 18 first cousins who are adults. Mr. Jaguar comes from a large family, which means things aren’t quite that simple. His father is the youngest of ten children, meaning that he has first cousins who are older than my parents—and a lot of them. The relatives that are closest to his age are either his second, or even third cousins. Even after eight years together and countless meetings, it still blows my mind, and I honestly couldn’t tell you what the exact numbers would total on that side of the family. Suffice it to say that we don’t have the room or the funds to invite all of them, plus partners, to our wedding.
So…we’re not going to invite cousins either. We’re going to keep it intimate, with immediate and direct family members only, and the rest of our guests will be people that we want surrounding us on the big day. When we discussed this with both of our parents, the ‘no cousins’ idea went down really well: both agreed that it would be the safest way to avoid upsetting anyone.
If I’m being perfectly honest, I’m not particularly close to any of my cousins, so I feel like it’s a good choice to make, except for one small obstacle: one of those cousins had me as a bridesmaid in her wedding a good number of years ago now. While we haven’t had any real contact whatsoever over the past few years, there’s still a part of me that feels obliged to invite her as being a guest at our wedding, even though it goes against our whole ‘consistency’ guideline.
I’m waiting for our save the date cards to be printed over the coming weeks, so there’s still time to make a few final tweaks on our guest list, but I’m curious to know how you all managed to get around the sticky situations when it came to your invited family members. Care to share a few hints and tips with this naive blogger?
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