Weddingbee Blog

I thought it might be interesting to do a breakdown of our guests to see how many family are coming, how many friends, and where they’re all coming from. Numbers are fun!

Family Tree Wedding Invite by Papermade Invites

Total Guests Invited: 83 (this is our first round of invites*)

• My family: 12
• Family friends (my side): 7
• His family: 31
• Family friends (his side): 3
• Our friends: 30

It’s harder to divide up the ‘our friends’ list. If pressed, I’d say that there are about 5 friends coming that are just ‘mine’, 5 that are just ‘his’, and the remaining 20 are ‘our’ friends. We work in the same industry, and end up hanging out with the same people.

As you can see, I have a very small family! That’s my parents, all (and by ‘all’ I mean ‘both’) of my cousins, aunts, uncles, my granny, some great uncles and a great aunt. Cinnamon Buns has much more family than I do. Until we get married…then they’ll be my family, too!

For both of us, the majority of our families are overseas—my family (apart from my parents) is all in England, and Cinnamon Buns’ family is a bit more all over the place in Northern Ireland, England, the US, Australia, but his parents are here in town. This is obviously going to have an effect on who actually makes it, because it is a long and expensive flight out here for most people. We’re pretty certain that no one from our grandparents’ generation will be at our wedding, and that’s OK. We knew this when we started planning a wedding that was here, and not in the UK. Yes, our family is important to us, but we also wanted to include our friends, and none of them could afford a destination wedding in Britain. It has been pleasantly surprising to receive RSVPs back and find out who is making the trip, though! We also had fun trying to figure out who the oldest person at our wedding will be. I won’t name names, but we think the oldest person there will be only be in their early 60s—we don’t blame our 80 to 90 year old relatives for not wanting to be stuck on an airplane for 10 or more hours!

Where are our guests from?

• 25 are local to this city - 30%
• 23 more are spread out over this country -  28%
• 9 are from the USA - 11%
• 26 are other international (England & Ireland, with one Aussie invite) - 31%

It’s always interesting for me to hear people talk about living in the same city (or the same street!) as grandparents and cousins and such… it’s very different to how I grew up. My mum’s parents were ‘nearby’ in that it took 6-7 hours of driving/ferry time to get to their house from ours. Everyone else I have met on trips to England when I was 2, 8, 16 and 19, plus times they made the trek out here to visit. This will be the first time since I was 19 that I’ll have seen my two cousins! (For those counting, that’s 8 years!)

What’s your guest breakdown like?

*As we get our replies back, we will send out a few more invites to some friends in town as we get confirmed ‘no’s’ from people. It’s not because we don’t love you, we just had to give Great Uncle Arthur the right of first refusal!