Naomi talks about how guest love using TXTourREGISTRY because it is so convenient. It makes gift giving easy. You can give a gift in 3 simple steps: TEXT, CHOOSE and GIVE. It’s that easy. More time for you to do what you want to do.
We’re having a backyard wedding with immediate family and close friends only. We want to create an intimate, casual vibe and we want everyone to feel like they are a part of our wedding since we are not having a wedding party. Here are some ideas we have so far:
1) Putting a section up on our wedding website so that guests can select a few songs they’d like played at the reception (on our ipod). For the guests that are married, we’re asking them to share their ‘first dance’ song so that we can honor them with it at the reception.
2) Having circular seating during the ceremony as opposed to rows. We think this creates a more inclusive vibe and does away with the hierarchy that row seating can imply. Plus our guests will be encircling us with their support (visually, at least).
3) Passing the rings around to guests during the ceremony so they can hold them in their hands and, if they wish, bless them or silently pray over them. Plus we just think this makes them feel a part of what’s going on.
Do you have any other ideas on how we can make our guests feel a part of things? Please keep in mind our ENTIRE wedding budget is just $1,000 so expensive ideas won’t be doable.
Thank you so much for your ideas! I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
If you don’t have any other IDEAS, please don’t comment. I’m not asking for your opinion on what I have come up with so far. I’m asking for IDEAS, not OPINIONS.
The weddings I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones I’ve felt most included at. Those, for me, are the most memorable too.
Wedding Fashion Advice & Tips For Guests
A question for recent brides and their mothers:
I own a wedding venue, and my brides always have major problems knowing how many guests will attend. The last bride sent 100 invitations, had 35 RSVPs, and 200 attended. They can’t plan for food, beverages, or table arrangements because they don’t know how many will show up. Short of calling all the invited guests and saying “Are you coming or not?”, how did you handle this situation at your wedding.
I can understand a few people forgetting or their reply being lost in the mail, but this is a huge problem. (I’ve have suggested they say “reception location provided with RSVP”, but no one has taken me up on that idea.)
Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Great responses. Thanks so much, and keep them coming. The brides are not lazy, just frustrated that they have to make calls while working or going to school and getting ready for the wedding.
Regarding leftover food, my venue does not do the catering itself. Each renter can contract with its own caterer or do the food themselves. We have made arrangements with a local charity to accept safe unserved food. They serve a hot meal once a week to those less-fortunate citizens of our town. Today, in fact, they will be serving leftovers from our last event — 15 pounds of barbeque beef, shrimp and broccoli pasta, potato salad, and other good food. We also donated from a catered breakfast — 90 scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and pastries.
I am in a wedding party and the bride has gone a little bridezilla-y recently. When she sent out invitation to the rehersal dinner, she specified explicitly what guests should wear giving specific examples such as men should be wearing kackis, dress shirts, ties and dress shoes. I thought this was a little rude and unnecessary because most people know to dress up for a rehersal dinner and you can simply specify semi-formal dress on the invite if necessary, but I let it go. However she recently sent out a reminder to the wedding party again telling us what to wear to the rehersal dinner and reminding us to wear our bridesmaids dress with matching shoes to the wedding. I sort of felt like she was insulting my (and the rest of her bridesmaids intelligence). Wear the ugly dress you just bought, duh!
She’s been driving me crazy recently and I can’t decide if I’m annoyed because she is being rude or because she is such a control freak with this whole wedding thing. So opinions please. Is she being rude?
To anyone who thinks that a wedding is your special day and means you get to act like a psychotic lunatic for the period leading up to it, your opinion is absurd. Weddings do not mean you get to walk all over your friends. I’ve been putting up with her increasingly ridiculous and expensive requests, temper tantrums and drama for over a month and have not said a word because I don’t need to stir up more issues for the girl before her wedding. I’m sure she’ll go back to her normal lovely self after the wedding. However, she has set the example for me of how not to behave when getting married. This is a purely hypothetical question to try to understand my own feelings towards her.
The wedding venue is 2 hours away from the bride’s family and 2.5 hours away (opposite direction) from the groom’s family. The bride and groom attend college there and, since it is about 1/2 way for each family, we thought about having the wedding at the college chapel. However, many of our family members are older and others might not want to make the drive. Would it be ok to charter a bus so they could attend? How would we word this? I am thinking of adding a card to the invitation, but don’t know what to say. Any ideas would be appreciated. We would pay for the cost. There would not be a cost to the guests, but we need to know an exact number because the bus company charges according to number of people going.
The transportation would be round trip and I was thinking that, since my husband works for a school (and the parking lot would be empty for the weekend) that we could arrange to leave individual cars in the school parking lot.