Save the Date question

Not sure this will help at all but we sent invites to everyone for the ceremony and evening reception, and a slightly different set of information to those we'd invited to the wedding breakfast too.

Those not coming to the wedding breakfast have 2-3 hours (depending on how long the photos take and when they want to turn up in the evening) to amuse themselves; either in the hotel bar, walking in the forest (theres a big picnic spot just across the road) or at one of the suggested places to go that we listed in our invitation pack.

I just sent mine to the day guests.

The people we are inviting just to the evening to be absolutely honest I wouldnt be that bothered if they didnt come ? We are inviting everyone we are close to to the whole day. I dont have any evening guests - they are all OH's extended family and some old friends of his that I dont see why we have to invite anyway but he wants to.

Also if you send them to the evening guests they may assume they are invited to the whole thing.

Just send them to the people that you really want to ensure are there so they dont book anything that clashes.

HTH

xxx

Hi there,

We sent out save the date fridge magnets, to our day and evening guests. As they both need to keep the date free, all my guests thought it was great. My evening guests thought it was great that we thought of them.

Hope I've helped in some way

I was marginally worried that if we sent them to evening guests, they might think they're invited to the day as well and then be put out if they don't get an invite.

The day guests are our close family and friends, evening guests are other friends, work colleagues, extended family etc.

i understand what you mean about not being too fussed about the evening guest though. I know it sounds awful but I would be really upset if any of my day guests couldn't make it, but not really if it was an evening guest.

I was also a bit worried of the cost for sending to everyone.

Thank you ?

x

It is a bit of a strange one. I actually revieved a save the day card yesterday for a wedding next April. I will be quite surprised if we are invited to the whole day........and i was not going to invite them to the whole day of mine. I think i will just inform close family and friends of the date and sent all the invites out 4 months or so before the wedding.

How has that gone down AJ? Some people gave my friend a real hard time when she did the same, I hope that's not the case with you!

Well nobody has said anything so far - perhaps some just haven't realised, or they don't mind. Thing is, if we end up inviting these 100 or so extra people to the WB then that would cost us the best part of £5000 for food and drinks extra which we just don't have.

Nobody has yet said that they'll only come to the evening, and the invitations said "be seated from 1.00pm for a 1.30pm service, and evening reception starting at 6pm" so I can't see how anyone can't figure out that there will be a big gap in the middle. The WB is only meant to be for close friends and family anyway, not every single person you can think of, and if people don't like not being invited to the WB then they don't have to come to any part of it, to be honest.

If they'd like to contribute the £50 it'd cost to feed and water them, I'm more than happy to acccept requests from anyone, however distant...

I'm just sending them to the people who I'll be inviting to the day. They'll be the most important to us and will be the people we'll miss if they can't make it due to holidays etc.

I think my friend made it hard for herself as she invited some of our group of friends to the WB and not others.

We sent STD's to both - but we put "evening reception" on the evening guests' STD. I was worried that people would set the whole day aside to 'only' be an evening guest, but at the same time, we wanted to include the evening guests. We're limited to how many can attend the ceremony due to the room size.

I'll be honest, if I got an invitation that didn't actually say "Entertain yourself away from us for a few hours" then I'd expect that the whole day would be spent with all the guests and include food in the middle. Seems a bit rude to expect them to bugger off and feed themselves. Personally, if I couldn't afford them at my wedding breakfast, I wouldn't invite them to the Ceremony, or would have chosen a less expensive meal/venue. Just seems really odd expecting them to know there is a few hours where they will be doing nothing. :/

Our room has the capacity - it's just our budget doesn't!

As most people are travelling for a couple of hours, it probably isn't worth them coming only to the evening reception so we thought it wasn't a big deal for them to come at 1pm for the ceremony, till about 3.30pm once the photos etc have been done, WB starts at 4pm, then evening celebrations start from 6pm so the 'wasted time' for those not coming to the WB is relatively minimal.

Also, being in the New Forest, a lot of people that are travelling have said to us that they don't know the area that well and quite like the idea of making a weekend of it so they can explore the forest a bit.

Once we hit the RSVP date, we'll look at our numbers again and we may selectively upgrade some people to the WB if we haven't hit our minimum numbers (60 WB and 100 evening) or invite some "more distant friends" to make up evening numbers.

It is a difficult thing but I hope most will understand. My number, b2b's number and her parent's number are prominent on the invite and response slip if anyone has any questions - and nobody has queried it yet.

Incidently, although the wedding is next September, we didnt' bother with save the dates - just sent out the invites.

When my brother got married they didn't send STDs, just invites. I'm keen on STDs though cause we're getting married August bank holiday weekend!

With the whole day / night thing, i think my brother and SIL put on their invites 'evening reception but you are welcome to come to the ceremony' (or words to that effect) so people understood clearly they could come, but just not to the WB.

x

WOW! I love the idea of Save The Date Fridge Magnets, whoever thought of that is a genius.

I do too!!

Saw the idea a while ago and we've also decided to have them! We've been through about 10 different designs but finally decided one so we're going to make them up over the next couple of weeks!

Vistaprint I've got the magnets for day guests and postcards for evening guests.

When my friend got married a while back, my group of friends all got evening invites but the bride said we were welcome to come to the church. We knew we'd be invited to the whole thing if she could afford it. I'd never miss her actual marriage for the world, so we all went to the church, I shed a few tears, then we went to the pub for some food and hung out till the evening. It did feel a bit weird going to the venue knowing we'd missed out.

AJ - I think you really need to clarify that everyone knows what the day involves. They'll probably be fine with it but I think they might be annoyed if they've misunderstood.

Also - how come you've sent your invites out if your wedding's not till September? I wouldnt have a clue if I could say yes or no, and I'm wondering if you're gonna get dropouts

Hi ladies,

Thank you for liking the idea of the fridge magnets, I've put one on my fridge! Think they're a great idea, as people won't loss them. As they migth do, a piece of paper. All my guest have been very understanding, when we gave our evening guests their magnets. We explained to them that, we were inviting only family and close friends for the day. But we wanted to invite them to the evening, they were just our the moon to be invited at all.

We will be sending out a 'reminder letter' to everyone probably July 2011 with things like train times etc on them to help people and remind them. It'll be quite clear by then that there is a 'wedding breakfast' for the closest friends and family between photos and the evening reception. I don't know how people can feel some sort of 'entitlement' to be invited to any part of your big day, to be honest, so I would be quite annoyed if people made a fuss because they weren't invited to a fairly small part of the day's plans (we are probably bumping the speeches into the evening celebrations so everyone can 'enjoy' them, so the breakfast is really little more than a meal). Frankly, if the fact they aren't coming to the wedding breakfast (at £50 or so a head) is such a big issue, then they're welcome to either pay to attend the WB - since we're paying out so much to entertain, feed and water them the rest of the day anyway - or not come. The people that truly matter to us both are invited to the wedding breakfast anyway - those not coming are mostly work colleagues and people you don't really want to invite but feel you have to at least send them one.

It may sound a little harsh, but overall I work on a very simple principle - if people aren't booked up for anything else on that day, then they're free to come and can decide to send back a yes if they want to, or no if they can't be bothered or we aren't important enough to them; then if anything else comes up on that day then they'll have to decline as they already have a commitment that day.

People may drop out - that's life (as long as they have the decency to let us know of course) - but the biggest issue is the last couple of weeks after we've given final numbers to the hotel and can't change it, and if something desperately urgent comes up then it makes little difference if we sent out the invites a year ahead (and helped people travelling a distance to figure out the distance, costs etc and what they need to save up to make it happen) or the 'normal' couple of months (when a large number of people might already be booked up).

If we could have, we'd have skipped the wedding breakfast completely but the hotel we both wanted to use don't allow you not to - so we concluded that we could either only invite a number we could afford, or find an alternative venue that was ok but not the one we truly wanted.

After all, I'm sure that the feeling of 'the dress' that most brides seem to get can't be that dissimilar to the feeling of having found 'the venue' that we both got...

Why not just invite them to the evening then?

''After all, I'm sure that the feeling of 'the dress' that most brides seem to get can't be that dissimilar to the feeling of having found 'the venue' that we both got...''

I'm the least girly girl EVER, but even I would have to disagree with that. I was dreading dress shopping but when I found THE dress it was magical and 10 times better than when we chose our venue.

We decided to send STD cards to both day and evening guests as we are getting married on a Friday AND also the day before Xmas Eve so people tend to make plans. Other guests live a few hundred miles away too, so it's important they know as early as possible to make travel arrangements, and yes, a few are actually coming only for the evening!

We are in exactly the same situation, both budget and room-size wise. We send STDs that only say "Save the date! DC &DO are getting married on Fri 23 Dec 2011, at ....House".

Thought I would drag this thread up again save starting a new one! What info did people put on STDs? I'm just doing ours now (fridge magnets too) and was just going to put the date, but should I put venues too? (church and hotel) There's not much space!

Hi Lisaanne

We had postcards saying 'please save the date!' and put our names and the date on the front as well as the name of the venue. On the back we had the venue's location and that was it. I think the rest of the info could go in a proper invite, STDs don't need to be too detailed imo, it is the date that you want folks to know!

Mm. I don't have this problem as all my day guests are coming to the reception. But if you're not really bothered if all the evening guests turn up then I would just send out Save the Date's to the day guests. Depending on when you send out the day/evening invitations it's likely most of the evening guests will have been warned enough in advance to take a day-off, etc. And your day guests will have already made the arrangements.
If that makes sense!

We sent out Save the Date magnets to both day and evening guests, but made it clear on them which were ceremony/meal or evening reception only. We're getting married on a Friday, so wanted the day guests to have plenty of notice (to take time off work if necessary) and didn't want the evening guests to take the day off work thinking they're invited to the whole thing! Also, as I work in a school many of the evening guests would be booking their summer holidays, so didn't want them to miss out. x