The Fine Art of Wedding Invitation Wording

IImagine walking through your local outdoor shopping center and all of a sudden hearing someone yell out all the details for a neighbors wedding. Sound strange? Back in the Middle Ages that was how it was done. Town criers announced weddings to everyone in the village and all who heard the invitation was welcome to come.  It actually sounds quite nice to me. No worrying about offending family and friends by not inviting them, no horrid nightmares about sending out the wrong date on the invites, and definitely no late nights staying up and stuffing invites into envelopes.

Not only is it not as simple now to get the wording on wedding invitations just right as it was in the Middle Ages, it’s not even as simple as it was two decades ago. Let me explain.

I have four words for you: “the modern-day family” and it’s anything but typical. Gone are the days of brides and grooms having one set of parents each and for that matter, of parent’s always being male/female couples. It’s impossible to count how many different combinations of family situations there might be at a wedding and thus wedding invitation etiquette can get quite tricky. No longer can you use traditional invitation rules. Not to mention, wedding invitations are becoming much more informal than they used to be. Is your mind spinning yet? I thought so.

I didn’t give a second thought to the wording on my invitations until I received the proofs and started showing them around to my family. That’s why my advice is this, put the time into wording your invitations properly before you get your proofs printed. It will save you a lot of stressful moments down the road.

Maybe you are lucky enough to have a simple family but if you don’t, I found HubPages’ Guide to Wedding Invitations the best information on the internet regarding wedding invitation wording (that I could find anyway). It gives a good background about tradition and etiquette and some pretty hard and fast rules that should make your spinning mind slow down a little.

Believe me, once you get the invitation wording out of the way it will be smooth seas ahead.

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