Weddingbee Blog

Time to talk a little about all the mailing that comes along with a wedding. The cost of postage stamps racks up pretty quickly, so what is a bride with far-flung family and friends to do? Really, the answer is going to be different for everyone, so here is what we worked out for ourselves.

(simple, classic, British stamp via http://postalheritage.org.uk)

We sent our save the dates at Christmas time, tucked into people’s Christmas cards. It meant we sent a few more Christmas cards than we would have normally, but that was still less stamps than mailing Christmas cards in one go, and save the dates in another.

I think we even packaged up a few cards together in a larger envelope for family members we knew would be gathering together in Ireland for Christmas. We also hand-delivered a bunch of them to work friends that are invited that we see quite often. This also meant we didn’t have to hound these people for addresses.

Now that invitation-mailing time is almost upon us, we’re being a bit more formal about it. Cinnamon Buns was all for hand-delivering all the ones in this city, hanging on to them until we can make plans with all the various friends, but I said no. Here’s my case for spending the extra dollars: I don’t think people get enough mail that isn’t bills or flyers. I want our guests to open their mailbox and be surprised and happy that there is a pretty blue envelope in there. Yes, it does seem a little silly, when you consider people like my friend MJ who lives 4 blocks away, or K who I’m working with right now, but I love it when I get mail that isn’t from my bank, so I want to give them that.

(I’m not too picky about what is on my stamps, but Quatchi just sounds funny via Stampcenter)

The next set of stamps to worry about are the RSVP stamps. About 40% of our invites will be going to people who don’t live in Canada, so we can’t put postage on their RSVP envelopes (unless we got someone to mail us a bunch of British stamps, so we can put them on the reply envelopes, put them in the invite suite, and send them back, but it’s a little late for that). We are also giving our guests the option to RSVP on our wedding website; the card says something along the lines of “Please RSVP by return of this card, or on our website.” With that option, how many of our guests do we really expect to return the cards to us? I expect we might get some back from our work friends at work, but those won’t need stamps. With those ideas in minds we made the decision to not put stamps on any RSVP envelopes. I am hoping we get some RSVP cards back, because they’re fun, and I want to see people’s answers, but it does seem like pre-stamping would be a waste of a stamp in most cases.

I’m sure someone is going to suggest that we should have had an RSVP postcard to save on postage. Here’s my answer to you: Canada Post doesn’t have a different rate for postcards. Americans are very lucky to have that!

The ghost of etiquette past might come and haunt me in my sleep, but we have made our decision. Unless I sneak stamps onto some RSVP envelopes when Cinnamon Buns isn’t looking.