It is now almost a month since Al and I got married and so now I can offer some advice in hindsight:
Think very carefully about who you invite. If you don't see aunty so-and-so that often but you think she would be hurt if you didn't invite her, don't invite her.
I'm saying this because of what my family did to us. Hopefully yours are not the same.
As you'd all know, when you plan a wedding, you get your final guest numbers and you pay upfront, or maybe straight after, based on the final RSVP's two weeks before, not on who actually pitches up on the day.
My sister hardly invited anyone in the family to her wedding and I knew that a lot of them were hurt by it. These very people that were hurt by this are not people I'm very close to but they are closer than like 2nd or 3rd cousins and so we decided that we'd invite them.
One of them RSVP'd that she'd be away, the others all RSVP-ed that they would come.
Then one lot were unsure and so I phoned to confirm and was assured that they would be there and if they needed to leave for an emergency, then it would be ok.
But none of them pitched! Only my mom and my sister and her husband were from my family, nobody else. There were 11 of them that just didn't bother to show up and what made it worse, no explanation was offered afterwards, no apology, absolutely nothing. We were very tempted to send them an invoice for all the money they had wasted but then again, what's the point.
Them aside, it was tremendous fun! :)
