Well, yes, it might be a nice idea if they answered them. Perhaps they might also want to carry them around, in order to have the address handy when they spot a silver tea service that would look darling in your new studio apartment. They could then file the invitation in the household calendar, so that they showed up at the right time and place. After that—okay, they're probably not going to have them bronzed.
What you don't want them to do is to forward them to Miss Ultimate Wedding with the indignant notation "Will you look at THAT!?!" written across your lovingly joined names. Yet people do that. And these are not finicky cranks like Miss Ultimate Wedding, who can tell real engraving from raised print, no matter how solemnly your printer swore that would be impossible. (Nevertheless, polite people are much too overcome with pleasure at the prospect of other people's happiness to enjoy a small sneer when people save the money of engraving by sending faked engraving, instead of even cheaper, but frank and honest, printing, or invitations written by hand.)
By far the largest category of invitations submitted for Miss Ultimate Wedding' disapproval are actually attempts to shake down the wedding guests, either by charging them or suggesting that they take over the couple's shopping for them. So much for the idea that rudeness is just an unfortunate symptom of unhappiness, while bliss inspires courtesy.
Other invitations that their recipients find distasteful are not ill meant. They are, to be sure, attempts to pull off a fast one, but for convenience, rather than profit. They are wrong answers to the question of "How can you treat people like wedding guests without actually having them as wedding guests?" (The right answer is, 'You can't.")
The most original example sent Miss Ultimate Wedding (and "original," in the etiquette trade, is generally not a compliment) was a formally worded one from a couple who gave themselves "the distinct pleasure of announcing our marriage. Our life together began in a private church ceremony consisting of just the two of us. Although your presence would have been a blessing and an honour, we ask for your continued thoughts and prayers."
Now, a wedding announcement is a perfectly respectable item of social correspondence. No apologies are made for not including the person at the wedding; the fact of the marriage is simply conveyed, after it has happened, and it calls for nothing more than a note of congratulation. This, with its unconvincing insinuation that the couple was somehow forcibly prevented from inviting guests, is a non-invitation rather than an announcement. The person who received it reported "a distinct lack of pleasure" in reading it.
Miss Ultimate Wedding trusts that it was a hideous mix-up of some sort and not similar to the attempt, described by a gentleman who reports: "On Tuesday, we received an invitation to the wedding of a friend's daughter—a wedding that turned out to have been the previous Saturday. I said to my
Me. and Mrs. Greatly Relieved have the honor op announcing the marriage of their daughter Darling Airhead to
Mr. Orville Suitable eight on Saturday, the first of April St. Jude the Obscure Church lookout, Maryland
wife, 'Well, we missed that one; what a pity. The invitation must have been delayed in the mail.' But then we looked at the postmark and it had been mailed on Monday. Why would anyone be sending out wedding invitations two days after the wedding?"
Perhaps the senders did not understand that you cannot use invitations for announcements (see above). If the thought was that those who were not invited would be nevertheless flattered to receive an invitation, presumably to cherish as a souvenir of an event from which they were excluded, it was not a good idea.
Then there is the lady who wants the wedding guests, only providing she doesn't have to get married: "My granddaughter, a twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher, has been living with a man sixteen years her senior, who has a son twelve years old. He has just closed a bar he operated and is apparendy heavily in debt. They are planning a large fake wedding—nothing legal, everything as if it were the real thing—because she wants to have a baby, but thinks if she is legally married to him, she will become responsible for his debts. Maybe I am too old-fashioned, but my husband and I refuse to go."
Yes, you two and Miss Ultimate Wedding are hopelessly old-fashioned in believing that wedding guests ought to be genuine guests invited to a genuine wedding. She suspects that the rest of the world has not progressed either to the point of enjoying being socially duped.
A Do-It-Yourself Invitation
Q. We are having a wedding for my daughter and her fiance at 3:30, with a reception afterward at the church with finger food, cake, and punch. That night, around 7 P.M., we plan to go to a restaurant where a band plays and the bride and groom can dance. How can we correctly invite guests to come join us there for eating or dancing, to watch the bride and groom dancing, and let them know that any expenses will be theirs? In other words, we would like for many of the guests to come join in the celebration, but cannot afford to pay the bill for everyone to eat or drink.
A. There is no correct way to issue an invitation for people to take themselves out to dinner, and Miss Ultimate Wedding is afraid that providing entertainment in the form of allowing them to watch a newly married couple dancing doesn't change that.
You can try to instill in them a desire to keep partying after the reception is over by running around the reception telling them, breathlessly, where you are all going later, and adding, as if spontaneously, "It would be fun if you went, too." Just don't blame Miss Ultimate Wedding if they have so much fun that they all decide to go along for the next stop, as well.
Handwritten Invitations
Q. I am planning a wedding for this spring and since my budget is not unlimited, I would like to know if hand-printed invitations (calligraphy) would be acceptable. I would still use formal style—the cards just wouldn't be professionally engraved. Would this upset people who received them?
A. Miss Ultimate Wedding hesitates to say what would upset some people nowadays, but anyone who took your plan amiss would have an upside-down sense of propriety. Engraving is the proper way of imitating handwriting for the convenience of large mailings of formal invitations. A bride who did have an unlimited budget might well consider having her invitations done by hand instead.
An informal wedding invitation is just as proper as a formal one provided that the informality is achieved honestly, with a letter, rather than by messing up the formal form (omitting honorifics, adding hearts and flowers, using nauseating phrases referring to the couple's sentiments for each other, or adding other unattractive or embarrassing "personal" touches) or by using faked engraving.
The European-style invitation is another solution to the complaint that the bridegroom's parents are omitted from the traditional invitation (because they weren't the hosts, because everybody knew them, because they lived next door to the bride's parents, and because nobody much cared about the male side of the event)
Multiple Parents
Q. When the parents of a child are divorced and one or both has remarried, does the child now have three or four parents, or does he continue having only the original two?
I have read many announcements where the parents are listed as follows: "Mr. and Mrs. John Jones and Mrs. Mary Jones" (where mother has not remarried); "Mr. and Mrs. John Jones and Mr. and Mrs. James Smith"; or "Mr. John Jones and Mrs. Mary Smith."
With all the remarrying of today, doesn't the child still have only two parents? (Deceased parents are a totally different issue.)
A. When it comes to distributing parents among children, Miss Ultimate Wedding is inclined to be generous. Her own dear mother—she only had one—was a teacher, and she used to be pleased when all sorts of adults, including former stepparents no longer married to a parent of origin, continued to take an interest in a child. So while the announcements you mention are socially cumbersome, Miss Ultimate Wedding is not going to condemn them.
Convictions
Q. I want to word my wedding invitations so as to include the women's names in an acceptable way without bowing down too much to tradition. It is important to me that women are not referred to as "Mrs. His Name" (first and last) because I believe that such wording, no matter how formal, implies not only that married women are unequal to their husbands, but also that married women are not important in their own right—that their identities are subsumed by the identity of the husband.
I have in mind having the names of both my parents and my stepparents at the top as "Adam Ray and Sharon Magnum with John Wesley and Susan Hearn Doe." I would prefer not to use the phrase "the parents of" as a way of avoiding the issue, because all of the people to be mentioned on the invitation are very important to me, will be paying substantially for the wedding and deserve to have their full names acknowledged.
A. Please allow Miss Ultimate Wedding gently to suggest that before one attempts to improve upon tradition, perhaps one should find out what that tradition is. Two points that you seem to have missed are that honorifics are used on formal invitations (but not "parents of") and that people should be consulted about how they wish to style themselves.
Never mind your arguments about how you think other people should be addressed, unless the ladies in question share them. If they do, the correct formal honorific before their full names is "Ms." If they do not, they should be styled Mr. and Mrs. In so personal a matter as a name, your convictions do not properly apply to people who do not share them.
The Invitation from Beyond
Q. I received an invitation that read: "Janet Smith and Dr. John Jones, deceased, request the honor of your presence at the wedding of their daughter . . ." (Incidentally, the mother has remarried since the death of Dr. Jones.)
A. It is not an uncommon impulse to want to treat the dead as if they were alive, and this particular kind of attempt to resurrect a parent for a wedding always breaks Miss Ultimate Wedding's heart.
Less tenderhearted people only break up with laughter. "He's dead!" they exclaim; "so just exactly where does he want our presence?" It is no honor to subject one's parent's name to such creepy usage. Only the living can issue invitations. This one should have been from "Ms. Janet Smith" or "Mr. and Mrs. Jeremiah Newhusband" requesting "the honor of your presence at the marriage of her daughter."
The Enclosures
What's this fat, unsolicited envelope in your mail, packed with forms that you must fill out and instructions that you must obey?
Did you forget that you put yourself on the waiting list of a college that is now suffering from post-baby-boom depression and has decided to admit you, after all?
Was the national draft re-instituted without your having heard about it, and have you been ordered up to serve your country?
Miss Ultimate Wedding can reassure you—somewhat. You have only been invited to a wedding by people who have gone around the bend.
Out of a frenzied desire to be helpful, or perhaps out of an insane attack of bossiness, these people are mailing you a package of options and orders that is second only to the federal income tax form in its bewildering complexity.
You have here:
Flight information, group rates at hotels, babysitting services, and valet parking validation.
Admonitions about not smoking, not arriving late, and not wearing colors that would conflict with the theme of the bridal party.
Directions on how to get there, and predictions about what the weather is likely to be.
Hints, and not too subtle ones, about how to make the occasion materially rewarding to the bridal couple.
A fill-in-the-blanks response card with a mysterious M-and a line on which you apparently
may indicate how large an entourage you have.
A deadline for answering the invitation, along with a threat in case you fail to comply with it.
A menu from which to select your dinner, or an order to bring a dish for everyone to eat, or a warning that there will be a charge for drinks.
Suggestions about what else to do with your time when it is not being occupied with the wedding or related events.
To those who just want to push all that junk off their desks and forget the whole thing, Miss Ultimate Wedding cannot offer relief. She can only plead with their prospective hosts not to inundate them with unnecessary, much less impertinent, material.
Most traditional enclosure cards are no longer used. A ceremony card enclosed with a reception invitation, or a reception card with a ceremony invitation, means that not all wedding guests were invited to both, a distinction that is bound to cause insult nowadays. Cards of admission imply that you expect your wedding to be crashed, which may be a reach unless you are a movie star or the president's daughter.
At-home cards, which give the couple's post-wedding address, do not go into invitations, but into wedding announcements. (Then they are highly useful, because, although the address may seem superfluous if the couple has been living together for years, they show the couple's choice of surnames.)
The address to which wedding invitation replies are to be directed should be that on the back of the envelope. And this brings Miss Ultimate Wedding to the distasteful question of enclosed response cards, with or without their own self-addressed envelopes cunningly decorated with a "Love" stamp.
It's not just that any response cards are not-quite-nice because decent people of course already know (yes? yes?) that they must always reply to invitations. The sad fact is that for indecent people, cards are not going to help. Just as many cases of unmailed response cards are reported as other unanswered invitations, so you might as well save the expense and trouble of enclosing them.
Miss Ultimate Wedding does admit the usefulness of enclosing instruction cards with invitations to out-of-the-way places. Other well-meaning information, such as transportation possibilities and deals and other recreational opportunities, should be conveyed informally, in separate letters to guests who accept the invitation.
Beyond that, the wedding planners will simply have to trust their guests to behave themselves and perhaps to fork over something the couple might like. Miss Ultimate Wedding is not guaranteeing that they will do this without instruction— they are your friends, not hers—but only pointing out that nagging is as rude as it probably is useless.
No comments:
Post a Comment