The Guest List

Evening or Whole Day?

The lady you work with every day or the friend you’ve not seen for 3 years but still send emails to? Your close friend’s boyfriend or an uncle you don’t like that much? When choosing your wedding guests it’s difficult to know who to invite. Your budget might dictate how many people you can invite, or the venue’s maximum capacity, either way you will probably not be able to invite everyone you want to your wedding day.

This is my problem at the moment. I come from a family where my Mum and Dad were one of 6, my fiancé's parents were one of 8 and one of 12, that’s 32 aunts and uncles before you factor in their spouses or their children.

Of course you include immediate family: parents, siblings, sibling’s spouses. Putting our closest friends on the list was easy. We see them all the time or we’re in close contact with them, that was the simple bit. But as we added our friends, space on the list got less and less. H2b and I are conscientious people, we genuinely want a lot of these people at the wedding. I genuinely want my aunt who I haven’t seen for a while because I think she’s cool. H2b genuinely wants his best mate’s parents at the wedding because of how they looked after him when he visited them. We would be fairly devastated if these people thought we couldn’t be bothered to invite them to the wedding!

One solution to the maximum number problem is to invite guests to the evening party. But will they feel put out or will they understand that we’re restricted by numbers? The last thing we want to do at all is disappoint anyone. If we didn’t want some people there it would be a lot easier, but everyone we’re inviting we genuinely want to come. But our guest list is now over our budget!

I like to think of myself as somewhat of a wedding expert but this guest list stuff is hard! When I find a solution I will blog about it! In the mean time, I will just stress about putting people on the evening list instead of the day list and hope that they won’t resent it!