The Guest List -- Part Two

Warning! Making the guest list is not pretty. It requires unflinching resolve, cold-hearted decisiveness, and great intestinal fortitude. In fact, this happy task often felt like dreadful draconian drudgery! Seriously, if you expect to have more than a handful of guests and stay within a budget, your list will have to be carefully compiled in order to proceed with any kind of meaningful planning. Almost everything you’ll do on The Day is based on how many guests will be attending the ceremony and the reception.

Brides should not be afraid to set some hard and fast rules when compiling their guest list. Here are a few that we observed while making ours:

• The six of us -- bride and groom and both sets of parents -- were the only ones allowed to submit names to the guest list.

• The bride and groom had full veto power over any name submitted by the others, but each of us would be allowed one “pity” invite that could not be vetoed. Vetoes could be appealed using chocolate, promises of filet mignon smothered in bacon, and other bribes.

• The designated cut-off date for submitting names to the guest list was the day we mailed out “save the dates” six months before the wedding. Only the bride and groom were allowed a grace period.

• With rare exception we did not invite anyone whom the bride or groom would not easily recognize on the street, and vice versa. 

• Small children were not invited because, among our friends, there were at least twenty! Much as we would like to believe that our dear friends could keep twenty infants and toddlers quiet and well behaved throughout the ceremony, we knew it was unlikely. We wanted all our guests, even those without children, to be able to give their full attention to the wedding without distraction. The one exception was the Flower Girl.

• Each guest would be invited by name. We did not send invitations to single friends with “and guest” tacked on because we assumed strangers would not be interested in our wedding. We were confident that we had enough delightful friends to keep even single guests happily engaged in conversation for a couple of hours.

• We stopped family invitations after first cousins even though many of our second cousins knew the bride. We would’ve loved to have them but it would have meant adding another twenty guests. 

• The old warning “if you invite this one then you must invite that one too” is no joke. We spent a good deal of time trying to anticipate the feelings of prospective guests, especially within family groups and known circles of friends, even if our relationship with them was somewhat tenuous. 

• We did not try to second-guess our guests with concerns about whether they got along with other guests. We considered that entirely their business and something they could manage on their own without interference from us. Invitations were based exclusively on our affection for those we invited, not on whether they had affection for one another.

I can honestly say it took all of the time from April to August to create our guest list. Even at that, despite much agonizing and trying to keep numbers down, when we mailed out the last invitation in January the final guest tally stood at 285.

My daughter will tell you she had several moments of panic when she was certain that we wouldn’t have enough seats for everyone at the reception, but I was confidently operating under the old adage: “Over invite and expect half”.

I also understood the laws of attrition. Though I would’ve been delighted if everyone we invited could attend, I was certain the number of guests would decrease at least 10% through regrets, 10% through unexpected situations the day of the wedding, and 10% between the church and the reception hall. That would leave us with about 200 for dinner. This was the number around which I was making our plans.