Weddingbee Blog

Hey there, hive! It’s been awhile. I thought I’d drop in to tell you guys a story that I was previously too embarrassed to share. It’s the story of how I forgot to invite someone to my wedding.

You see, I have this friend. We’ll just call her Elle. Although if she’s reading this post, I’m sure she knows who she is.  Elle and her husband were on our guest list from the beginning. I met her in law school, and we hung out occasionally and took a couple classes together. She and her husband invited the Dude and me to their wedding, which was about a year before ours—we went and had a blast. Even though we weren’t exactly attached at the hip, I knew that I wanted Elle and her husband at our wedding, so we added them to our guest list, a spreadsheet I had created on my computer in Excel.

Cut to April of 2009, about five months before our wedding (and right before I started blogging for Weddingbee!). The Dude and I were at work one day, when some burglars broke into our house. They took everything: the Dude’s expensive music equipment, my grandmother’s jewelry, our recently purchased wedding bands, and YES, my laptop.
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Or, as I like to call it: EGLP. We’ve all heard of it. You have a guest list set and you’re just trucking along in your planning, happy to finally have a set number of people and not have to worry any more about who you will or will not be inviting.

Then, you get ready to send out your STDs (or invites, whatever), and someone goes “Oh! So-and-so isn’t on the guest list? They have to be invited.” and then someone else goes “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe we forgot so-and-so. We have to add them, plus their three kids and their kids’ neighbors, and their best friend’s hairdresser.”

Okay, so maybe it’s not that ridiculous, but you get my point. Our guest list seems to have gone from this:

(Source)

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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!
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Planning a destination wedding? Well, there’s one thing they always tell you - be prepared for many “declines”. Obviously, it’s not easy for people to just jump on a plane and romp on some island for a week.

I guess it’s good advice, since our wedding is no exception to the general rule. Here are the numbers:

Egads! Only 40% of our loved ones are actually coming!

At first, I was irrationally upset. Every “no” RSVP depressed me, and it got to the point where Mr. Sew would have to open the envelopes - I couldn’t stand to see the bad news. Some of the declines, in conjunction with the “why are you having your wedding there” statements, felt like personal “I don’t care about you” messages. And it hurt.
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… unless it’s the Hammies.

I know this movie by heart.

Hive, I’d like your opinion. And I’m really hoping that it will confirm *my* opinion, but we shall see, won’t we?
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When I say trim, I’m not talking haircut… I’m talking guest list. Whether you are planning your wedding or are just stalking these sites until you and your love are ready to plan your wedding (don’t lie, we’ve all done it)… you will inevitably get to the point where you must tackle the dreaded guest list. And please know, I say that with love—but good grief, is it ever difficult to narrow down a list of people who you will invite to one of the biggest days of your lives. And yes, I realize I just said good grief and that makes me sound like I’m 85 years old and I’m okay with it.

On one hand, you don’t want to invite people that you feel required to invite but on the other hand, you don’t want anyone to get hurt or feel left out. It can be a very expensive guilt-trip.

I have a confession to make. I hear many people say that with an unlimited budget, they would invite everyone they possibly could. I’m not one of those people. There. I said it. I’m of the opinion that no matter what my budget, there are only certain people that really matter to me to have there. I would prefer to have it be small and intimate. I realize that there are many that will disagree but that’s what makes this bloggerific world so entertaining, yes?

(source)

I’m no expert but I do have a few ideas of how to go about the process in a way that may help alleviate some of the strain it can put on you as a couple.
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With our (admittedly early) RSVP deadline already past us, it’s time to crunch some numbers.

Much like Miss Pug mentioned, when we were estimating how many people to invite to our wedding based on budget and room capacity, I had trouble figuring out what a good acceptance rate would be a reasonable estimate. Somewhere on the internets, I stumbled upon a predicted 75% yes rate and decided that sounded legitimate: I’d go with that. So we invited 214 people, hoped for 160 but planned for 180 just in case (which would have been an 85% yes response rate).

While we’re still missing about 5 RSVPs, I feel pretty confident predicting those responses, so here’s the breakdown:

Out of 214 people invited, we’ll have about 135 attending (plus or minus a couple in case I guess the remaining RSVPs wrong). That’s a ~63% acceptance rate.
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As promised, I wanted to report our final guest list statistics. I’ve always found these kind of posts helpful, even if just for finding some peace of mind while planning your list.

You might recall, I mentioned that our final guest list was 297. Yeah, well, that was before the week that I like to call “Guest List Goes Wild Week”.

Apparently, since we were a few (THREE) people under capacity and feeling really laid back about it, everyone - my parents, Burger’s parents, and Burger and I - padded their lists a little bit. That padding bumped our overall guest list from 297 to 321. THREE HUNDRED TWENTY ONE.

Enter Cheeseburger meltdown.

After some frantic phone calls, a few tears, and a mild panic attack, the six of us were attempting to cut our lists down.

The majority of the problem was my fault. You see, I included Burger’s brother & sister and their dates as part of Burger’s Family’s list and my brother & sister and their dates as part of my parents’ list - and our parents included them in ours because our siblings are in the bridal party. Whoops. It might not sound like a lot, but 9 people is almost half of the unaccounted for additions to the original 297! I felt terrible.

After a few days of meticulous cuts, we had our final number. 306. Only six people over. I could live with that (nervously… very nervously).
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When I was considering venues and forming our initial guest list (wow that was a long long long time ago), I was always interested in any information regarding how many of the invited guests actually come to the wedding. The numbers of course differ based on many factors, such as the size/location/time/etc. of the wedding, but I wanted to quickly share our numbers.

Our venue capacity is 60 people. We invited about 65 people, 61 of whom could realistically make it (we were 99.99% sure that a few older relatives would not be able to make the cross-country/international trip). About 17 invited guests are from the Bay Area (i.e. close to the venue), and the rest were from out of town, so we considered it a semi-destination wedding.

Of the 65, 48 have RSVPed as “yes”. That is around 70%, or 75% of the 61 guests we felt could realistically make it. This seems like a reasonable percentage to me.
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This is by no means a new issue in the wonderful world of planning a wedding. Figuring out The Plus One Situation is difficult for a lot of couples when building their guest lists. And while we finished our guest list a while back, The Plus One Situation has lingered on my mind.

We started with a blanket rule - any of our friends that were dating someone seriously who we’d met before, were invited with guests. We addressed their invitations to Friend & Friend’s SO by name so that there would be no confusion. As in, if Friend’s SO couldn’t make it, they should come alone.

We handled friends who didn’t fit those criteria on a case by case basis. Generally, we did not give single friends guests because we were already over our ballroom’s capacity. However, in certain situations we made some exceptions. For people who we really wanted to come, but who didn’t know many other people (or anyone, for that matter) that were invited, we allowed an “& guest”. In these cases, our friends were extremely gracious and appreciative, which made us very happy with our decision.
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When we originally started to plan, we wanted to invite everyone who had been an important part of our lives and our families’ lives. Our guest list was enormous. As time went by, we started setting up our priorities. We both want the wedding to be about the joining of two families. We felt a more intimate wedding would allow us to really enjoy the special moments with our closest family and friends.

In the beginning we stressed about hurting peoples’ feelings and didn’t want to leave anyone out. But if we invited more people, it would mean less time with those who are the most important to us. Our guest list began at over 350 people. We ended up getting it down to about 200 people. That is not what some would call intimate, but when you come from a large family and Christmas includes about 100 people, this is quite a cozy wedding in my eyes.

Michael Sparks Keegan photography

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I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the first things I wanted to do after Mr. Guinea Pig and I got engaged was to make a guest list. I’m not even sure why, exactly, but I was SO excited about making this list of everyone we loved and wanted to share in our celebration.

(source)

So we made a list, sent it to our parents for any additions, and then sat on it. Of course, at this time we also decided that we would be getting married 18 months later. This list remained essentially untouched until we decided to send out our save the dates: so about 9 months later, we emailed out a Google Form to everyone on the list asking them to fill in their addresses. {This very handy feature has already been blogged about here by Ms. Fondue, and now Google has actually teamed up with Style Me Pretty to make lovely templates for this, too!}
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That is the one thing I never ever ever thought that I would hear myself saying. I am extroverted, I am outspoken, I am decidedly non non-confrontational. That’s not to say that I am confrontational, but I don’t let people walk all over me, I speak my mind, I say what other people are thinking but are too scared to say—that’s just who I am. I’m a lot like my dad in that way, and you’ll either love me or despise me, but I stay true to myself either way.

A guy once wrote in my high school yearbook that I was “ruthless”- I took it as a compliment. I’m not a mean person, I’m actually very nice, polite, and compassionate—until someone wrongs me, then I go for the jugular (granted… I do choose my battles). That said, on the rare occasion that someone gets me to that point, I say my piece and proudly exclaim to Mr. Rainbow, “A doormat, I am not!” That is, until now.

Do you remember this little post in which I wrote about cutting down our guest list? How proud I was to share the news—that we got our guest list down to 30 people? 30 people! That is awesome! I’m sorry, was awesome. Yes, you read correctly… was awesome.

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“Checkin’ it twice…”

Our guest list, that is.

(source)

While ’naughty’ and ’nice’ don’t quite figure into the equation, making our guest list has proven to be one of our more difficult tasks.

Our total number of invitees was something that I wanted to estimate early. Like, within a month of our engagement early. You see, I knew we would have quite a large number, and I figured that it might restrict our reception location search (it did - we only had two options, one of which was out of budget). So when I asked our parents to start working on a rough number right away, I think they were taken a bit by surprise.
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We’ve hit a road block. Wedding planning is easy when you’re trying to decide cake flavors or floral varieties (the things that feel important but that, ultimately, are not very), but it’s hard when you’re fighting your family. The details are kind of personal, but the problem is probably somewhat universal: we’re out of space on the guest list, and that’s making some family members pretty angry. When someone as close as a grandmother (or, more precisely, the only living grandparent either of us has) threatens not to attend the wedding over it,* it makes you rethink some things (and also makes lining envelopes feel pretty irrelevant).

I’ve struggled with writing this post because it does touch on some really personal issues, but I know that many of us have hit road blocks just like this… and in the happy happy world of wedding planning, sometimes some of us can benefit from knowing that we’re not alone when the people we love can’t meet our expectations, and that there are others sailing in the same boat. At least, I know I could benefit from it.

I’m pretty lucky because it’s not affecting the most important thing:
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