How to create your Wedding Guest List
Posted by Patti Wellington on Mon, Sep 06, 2010 @ 12:22 PM
The faces that line the aisle on your wedding day should be special to you. Making your wedding guest list is a challenging process because you don't want to forget any essential guests or succumb to the pressure to invite (and pay for) nonessential guests. Here are some guidelines to follow for building, managing and trimming your wedding guest list.
Making the Wedding Guest List:
Your wedding guest list should everyone you would ideally like to invite to your wedding. Think about all of the people you would like to share this special day with.
1. Determine the number of wedding guests: Knowing what kind of wedding you want and how much you have to spend, use that information to decide how many guests you can invite. Keep in mind that the headcount at your wedding reception is the biggest expense in your wedding budget.
2. Make the A-list: The bride and groom should sit down with pen and paper and make out their wedding guest A-list, which should include essential wedding guests and anyone and everyone who should bear witness to your marriage.
3. Get the financial contributers' guest list: Parents of the bride and groom, especially if they're helping to foot the bill, should have some say about who's invited from each family. Decide how you will divide the wedding invitations. (Hint - a couple of options are to divide the invitations in half between the bride and groom's family or, if you share friends, give each set of parents one third of the invites to send to family and close friends).
4. Make the B-list: put together a short list of people that are somewhat important but that arent' going to be on the first list - coworkers, your boss, third cousins and children.
How to cut the Wedding Guest List
Once you've made a wedding guest list of everyone whom you would like to invite, you're going to have to make some adjustments to the list to fit your budget and venue restrictions. This is not an easy task - keep only the wedding guests whose presence you will really appreciate.
1. Consult the list against the party budget. If necessary, cut the wedding guest list down by removing non-essential guests.
2. Make objective standards for inclusion and exclusion, especially if you're having trouble cutting the wedding guest list on a name-by-name basis.
Here are some popular suggestions for cutting the wedding guest list:
a) Decide whether or not you will invite children.
b) Ask single people not to bring dates. This is a good way for your single friends to meet.
c) Do not invite people to reciprocate for invitations or gifts that they've given to you.
d) Cut anyone you haven't spoken to in a number of years.
e) Cut all co-workers you do not socialize with outside of work.
f) Cut the heavy drinkers. You'll spare yourself some drama and a hefty bar tab.
3. Once you start getting back responses of people who may not attend, consult the B-list and send out a few more invitations for these people, seeing there is some room now. Try to do this in a timely manner so these people don't feel like last minute invites.
Follow these guidelines and you'll find that the daunting task of creating a wedding guest list won't be as bad as you originally thought.