It's Away!

Delivered the first of many wedding invitations to the Fiance's sister today, since we went there for a visit for July 4th, watching all the illegal fireworks go off, since the fog obscured the view of many of the other big blow-ups. (July 4th and fireworks tends to remind me how we are a people who like to blow things up. How we intricately link freedom to war and freedom as a product of war.)

Anyway, will be heading to the post office tomorrow to send off a good bulk of the invitations. The others we'll be hand delivering to family members and others still we're still trying to track down actual mailing addresses for people we usually call or email.

And indeed we hand addressed the inner envelopes in our best penmenship. All the weddig etiquette sites say you have to hand address the invitations. And as with most cultural etiquette notes I wonder why and how this etiquette rule will continue in the presence of computers everywhere. Even my 8 year old cousin types out her book report. And I wonder if machines were readily available to most people, would this rule exist. Though I do understand the underlying purpose of making the invitation more personal. But unless you can afford a calligrapher, there's always that issue of the aesthetic of the invitation presentation. Certainly, I'm all for the thank you notes to be handwritten. We decided to go half way and hand address in the inner envelope, but print out labels for the outer envelope because I would hate for it to not reach its destination due to our illegible handwriting.

The invitations took a bit of a roadtrip to finally be complete. To my sister's place on Thursday evening to be glued. She's quite adept at that sort of thing. Back to me on Saturday and in our trunk as we drove to Modesto, to San Jose, then finally to Union City, where my aunt's family helped assemble the different parts. (The Modesto to San Jose to Union City was a rather frustrating ordeal that tires me just thinking about it, but we got a box of fireworks out of it that we lit that night and that's what was important) Sunday, the invites headed to my mom's place, where we added the final decor, addressed the inner envelopes, to my place today where I stuck on the labels and triple checked it against my list, to tomorrow when I'll find out just how much it costs to mail these things to their final destinations. whew! Fortunately we have several invites to spare.

Most of the wedding websites say send the invites 4-6 weeks in advance. We're going for more like 3 months, because we figure it will take that long, plus intensive phone calls to determine all the RSVPs. Plus we will need the extra time to figure out the seating arrangements as well.

This month will be full of phone calls to various vendors: hotel, church, baker, etc. Next month is craft time: decorations, favors, etc. And September is the crunch time month called everything else.

After finishing the invites, the Fiance came to realize why people just get married in Vegas. We would do that too, but 300 people would still show up.