Wedding Invitations: The Headache of Choice
As a bride-to-be, the most difficult first step of preparing for
the wedding wasn't deciding on which dress to choose, or what
colors would be incorporated for the event. It was choosing what
would best represent my soon-to-be husband, our families, and
me, as invitations.
My husband-to-be, my future mother-in-law, and I all met at a
local party supply store. What lay before us was much more of an
undertaking than we originally thought. The store clerk led us
back to a small section of the store with a large table and a
few chairs. The entire back side of the table was covered with
more than twenty thick catalogs! We were left to fend for
ourselves, with no idea of where to start or which catalog to
look at first.
My mother-in-law, being the go getter that she is, picked up a
catalog and started flipping through the pages. We had already
discussed what we were looking for, previous to going to the
store.
What we had in mind was a little less formal than the average
invitation, but still nice enough to attract our friends and
family to come. We didn't want anything too religious or frilly,
and we wanted something that would reflect our combined
families, all without being too pricey. After looking through at
least ten catalogs, we started to notice that many of them
repeated the same designs, only replacing the verbiage on the
inside of the invitations. We finally settled on a design we had
seen in several of the books, after deciding that we weren't
going to find anything less formal without having to pay for the
extra postage due to size.
After thinking back on the entire planning process, we would
have been better off having our invitations custom made. I
wasn't completely happy with the invitations we had, and when we
got them from the printers, half of our reply cards had been
printed wrong. We almost sent them out that way, but luckily
caught the mistake after being halfway done putting the postage
on them.
With a custom invitation, we could have had the style we wanted,
with the verbiage we wanted, without the hassle of finding what
we wanted ourselves. At that point, the cost would have not been
an issue because the headache of trying to find something we
could agree on would have been eliminated.
I have several friends that are planning weddings now. When they
ask me about the best place to go for invitations, I advise them
to go to a place that works with their wants and needs, rather
than one that sits you in a room with catalogs and lets you go
at it yourself. Planning a wedding is already hard enough
without having so many choices to make about an invitation. It
should be easier than picking out your dress or colors, not a
headache with an ocean of catalogs to spend hours sifting
through.