First of all, PHOTOGRAPHY UPDATE: I clicked the link.
I did it. I looked at the first batch of my wedding photos.
Fifteen times in a row.
I did it for you guys. And the money and fame. Wait, that’s not right. I did it for you guys. And to finally sate my raging curiosity.
We are still eagerly anticipating the photos from our other photographer, so I think I’ll just wait until I have all of them to figure out which ones are going up here. Or perhaps I will just grow impatient and post some of the ones I already have. Gist of this story: I shall make it up as I go!
And hey, by the way, thanks for taking the poll in the last post. Over 60 people voted, which is, like, way more people than I actually even thought were on the interwebs.* A whopping 72% of you — which, according to my careful calculations, comprises roughly one third of the total poll-takers — want to see all of the pictures, oh my god, like right now. Two of you only care to see me at my ugliest, and one of you apparently wants only pictures of my shoes. Surprisingly, absolutely no one expressed interest in acquiring animated GIFs of Anthony Michael Hall, which is totally the response I would have selected if I’d actually taken the poll. Most of the rest of you replied along the lines of “post whatever you’re comfortable with,” a sensible answer I chose not to include in the poll options because I was Trying To Be Funny. One notable response featured some good advice about posting only the photos that make me “flutter,” another managed to lovingly address me as “beeotch” (thank you!), one endeavored to inform me that I am hot (beau, I’m looking at you), and yet another simply replied, “Your Mom.”
I am truly touched. So touched, in fact, that I want to include a poll in every post, just so I can see what you come up with next. But lo, such a gimmick would soon grow old. And I just had to restrain myself right there from making a poll about whether or not you like polls. So yes! Hurrying on! Photos and stuff, I will show them to you in some future post!
Meanwhile, there’s so much I want to tell you about getting married, you guys. For example, it turns out that when you get married people give you gifts. I was just as shocked to learn this as you are, but not as shocked as I was the first time I sent someone else a wedding gift and received a thank you card for it well before the actual wedding had even transpired. Seriously. Has this ever happened to you? It never had to me until just this year, and then all of a sudden, BAM. Advance thank you cards have arrived in the mail for every single wedding we’ve attended thus far. Do I smell a fresh new trend, or am I just really late to the party?
When I got that first early thank you, I had to back up off of it and set my cup down. I’d always envisioned opening gifts after the wedding, and here these other folks were turning that concept on its head. After the first few boxes from our registry** arrived, there commenced a few days of hand-wringing and brow-furrowing as I worried with the beau over whether or not it would be rude to for us to save them until we got back from honeymoon instead of ripping them open immediately and sending back a prompt thank you. We eventually decided no, we were just going to wait, trends and etiquette and general mobility around our living quarters be damned. And so those boxes kept coming, and we kept stacking them up along the walls and running into them with our shins. Ow! No matter, for I was bound and determined to have something to look forward to after the wedding, dammit.***
Getting gifts for your wedding is icing on cake. It’s a consolation prize — well hey, we just spent a year fighting over paper products and crying ourselves to sleep at night, but look, baby, a rice cooker! I couldn’t see the fun in prematurely spoiling that gleeful reward. It would be like opening gifts before your birthday! Except they are gifts you already picked out, so it’s not like there’s any element of real surprise involved. Still, you can never really know for certain what the contents are. Like that one box your mom’s friend constructed out of two glue gun boxes taped together and then wrapped in a brown paper bag? What the hell did she put inside that thing, anyway?
So last Saturday night we poured ourselves some drinks and finally sat down to find out. And you know, I never felt like I could talk about wedding gifts without coming off like a covetous, foot-stomping asshole with dollar signs for eyeballs, but I’m about to put on my asshole hat**** and do just that. A few points to remember about wedding gifts:
- Some guests will not give you gifts.
- This fact will cause you to experience a low-simmering mix of bewilderment, insult, and doubt.
- At least it did for me, anyway.
As we opened our gifts, the beau tracked them on our guest list so that we would know whom to thank for what. But as he marked the last gift down, he couldn’t help but notice all the, uh, gaps. “A lot of people didn’t get us anything,” he murmured quietly. “That’s okay!” I chirped. “Who really cares? That’s not what we got married for, anyway.” And I truly, wholeheartedly believe this statement. I do.
But then after a minute or two of silence, I had to ask: “Who?” And as the beau rattled off the list of names, I felt myself sink into a little funk. Check this: four out of the beau’s five groomsmen didn’t give us anything. Okay, granted, two of them tried to get us things that fell through (concert tickets, for example). But still. Some of the people closest to him didn’t deign to get him anything? What the hell?
I am reluctant to admit I had these feelings, because their very existence makes me feel like the epitome of MonsterBride IIV: Now That I Have Your Soul, Please Proceed To Give Me All Your Money.***** Yet even though I tried to squelch them, they continued to well up in me unbidden: Who goes to a wedding and doesn’t send a gift? We gave them gifts for their wedding. How freaking RUDE is that? Do they think that our parents paid for the whole damn thing, as if that would even make it okay? Did they just forget? Do they just not care? Do they secretly hate us? I can’t believe we gave them all that booze when they secretly hate us!
And then the real zinger of doubt: Oh my god, what if they sent a gift but it got lost or stolen and now they’re going to think we’re rude for not sending a thank you card?! I don’t want them to think I’m impolite and unappreciative of their thoughtful gesture!! And I can’t bring it up to them, because then I’ll look like I’m fishing around for presents!! Cue frantic hand-flapping, waves of anxiety. This etiquette thing? It kills me sometimes.
But you know what? It’s fine. A day or two after those feelings came, they ebbed away. I just don’t have it in me to resent people – people I genuinely like – for not playing along with traditional wedding rules. I don’t really want or need any more stuff, anyway, and as I already mentioned, that’s not what our marriage was ever about. So there. Take that, petty and ignoble emotions. You can just go stick a fork in your eye, because I’m done with you.
Overall, we were incredibly, ridiculously blessed on our wedding day, in both material and spiritual terms. “Overflowing with love”****** would be a fairly accurate description, and in my book, that’s way better than the dutch oven left unpurchased on our registry could ever be. So that’s the moral I’m going to end this story on: our friends gifted us with love and support, which is all we ever needed in the first place.
And now, before you go hurl in a Dixie cup from all the saccharine cuteness, I want to leave you with a fascinating bit of history. My mother, in a hyperactive fit of “let’s document everything for posterity,” typed up the old handwritten list of gifts she and my father received for their wedding and emailed this list to me. The perspective between then and now is fascinating, at least to me. True, they were wed in a heavily Polish part of rural Michigan, where the tradition was to give cash for the wedding (hence the wee smattering of gifts on the list), so their experience is not necessarily reflective of overall trends in the 1970s. Still, I’m amazed to see how grand of a gesture it was to give $30 for a wedding 31 years ago.
Makes me feel pretty damn lucky, that.
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* I thought there were only seven people on the interwebs, one of them being a snarling, ironic-mustachioed hipster whose vast music library is comprised only of Bands No One Has Never Heard; one of them being a seething, mouth-frothing, patriotism-swilling Tea Partier; one of them being a Bob Marley-blaring, 420-loving, godless liberal socialist communist hippie; one of them possessing an impressive collection of tinfoil hats; and three of them being tweens lacking basic reading comprehension skills who are on a dogged quest to bring about the utter destruction of the English language (“OMG woah Thatsso stooped R U th Dummest person ever hehe LOL :P”).
** Registry sidebar: we made a Wishpot registry for our honeymoon, and an Amazon.com registry for our housewares. I wished we had used Traveler’s Joy for the honeymoon registry instead – when you go to make a payment, Wishpot just dumps you into PayPal’s website, which feels sort of sketchy and tacky – but the Amazon universal registry ended up working out perfectly. About 95% of what we wanted was actually being sold through Amazon, which meant our guests got free shipping. Not that that actually mattered in the end – the vast majority of our guests actually ended up buying off the honeymoon registry, which was admirably anti-traditional of them. There you go, kids! That’s the way to strike a blow against the Wedding Industrial Complex! Or something!
*** Let me just say that I was VERY EXTREMELY GOOD about not looking at our registry to see what had been purchased, so by the time we got around to opening them, it was like opening boxes of stuff you’d packed away years and years ago: “Oh, yeah! That! I love that! Yay!”
**** I’m not at all certain what this is, but I’m willing to wager it involves the likeness of Glenn Beck.
***** Personally, I much prefer Monsterbride XI, feat. Ol’ Dirty Bastard: You Know My Name, Now Gimme My Money.
****** Oh, and terror. I was fairly overflowing with terror, at least in the hours before the ceremony.
I find this interesting. What I’ve read is that you send a thank you card as soon as you get a gift. And in my family, when you get a bday present or card in the mail you open it right then and there.
My fiance’s family is the exact opposite. They wait until the day of to open the collection of cards, which I find ridiculous.
So we have the same feelings on this. I want to open it now, he wants to open it later.
Did you have a shower? I’m just wondering what you did then.
I’ve read that a couple technically has a year to send a thank you card after a wedding, which is far too long a timeframe for my tastes. But all the weddings I’ve ever been to up until this year, I didn’t receive thank you cards until a few weeks after the wedding, leading me to believe they had actually opened it afterwards. I’ve also read that in some areas of the country, it’s popular to have a gift-opening session the day after the wedding, so who really knows. I don’t believe sending a thank you before the wedding is at all wrong — a thank you card is NEVER wrong — but I just hadn’t seen it done until recently. One real benefit of sending thank-yous as you receive gifts is that you don’t have a mountain of cards to write after the wedding, that’s for sure.
For my shower, I had about 12 people there, and they all gave presents then, so I opened them right there. If I’d gotten any in the mail, I probably would have waited until the day of or day after the shower to open them, because I enjoy torturing myself.
We’re working with doing our thank you cards after the wedding. (that being said, we are now 4 weeks out and have 2 gifts at home).
The main reason is that we are going to have a wedding photo of us as the front cover of the cards.
We gave my FHs brother a nice gift for their wedding in March and, to be honest, I’m a tad offended by the fact that we still havent seen a thankyou card. It should be simple and its a polite thing to do!
I’ve been reading Miss Manners (more to come on that later) but basically she advises sending out thank you cards within half an hour of receiving a gift, which I guess falls into the open immediately camp by default then. She also says that the having one year to send out thank you cards is being confused with the guests having up to one year after the wedding to send a gift. [edit to my own comment: read through the rest of the comments on the list and it’s already been mentioned. But I’ll just say that not following Miss Manners doesn’t automatically make you a jerk.]
I didn’t know about either, my family doesn’t do thank you cards, but I’ll probably go with opening immediately because I compulsively can’t let things just lie around. I see the appeal of saving them up until after the wedding, though. From a gift giver’s standpoint, I think it’d be nice to receive a thank you card (if I’m receiving one at all) as quickly as possible to know that it’s been received safely, at least.
It seems to me that you are having entirely reasonable feelings about the gift business and I can see myself in the same position. Feelings are feelings, and it sounds like you’re pretty quick to get over the ones you don’t want, which I aspire to 🙂
Though I’m also with you on getting steamed about things and having rants that are just basically WHO DOES THAT?!?
Also I kind of love polls.
My mother and my inlaws each contributed about the same about in food/drink to the wedding. Call it somewhere between $1000-$1500. His parents then bought us a spanking red high efficency washer and dryer as a wedding gift. My mother neither gave a gift or wrote a card or hell, signed the postcard-guestbook. 6 months later and I’m still a little bitter, so I totally feel you. It makes me feel bad, that I kept score, but I did.
we had some non gift givers too and i was pretty steamed. but now i’m over it. besides we made back more than what was spent on the wedding. pretty neato. did you have a bunch of no shows?
i had a few. one of them i am still in a huge funk about – like such a huge funk i want to egg her house but i won’t. some no shows i understand, but when you RSVP and decide the morning of the wedding not to come b/c you’re upset that i’m still upset that you made an anti-semitic comment about my future children… well, that’s downright effed. anyways… totally the wrong place to vent.
anywaysssssssssss. yay for pics! can’t wait to see what you decide to share!
Angie — this is totally the RIGHT place to vent. Bring it, sister.
We had maybe two no-shows that I can recall, but I found out later one of them had the flu, so no grudge-holding on my end. Your worst no-show sounds like she needs a lesson in humility and acceptance, stat.
I feel like part of my anger doesn’t even stem from the fact that we “lost out” on the no-shows and non-gifters so much as it stems from the fact that it really steams my inner Miss Manners. No matter what the social situation is, the indignant part of me will always rear up and be like, “Who DOES that??? Who???”
According to at least one of my wedding checklists, you were BAD for not checking your registry to make sure you have enough unpurchased items at a variety of price points at all times!
Being an immigrant, I seriously doubted my North American wedding etiquette so I armed myself from the get go with plenty of Miss Manners. This is where I learned that indeed you are supposed to open wedding gifts as they arrive and send a thank you note. Dutifully we did this until the week of the wedding when shit hit the fan. Of course, this hasn’t helped post-wedding, since I also feel it’s nice to send a picture. So now we are sending some people secondary notes, awkwardly re-iterating thank you’s (how do you thank someone for towels twice?? sure they are nice but they are TOWELS, the first time is hard enough). And yes, it is three months post-wedding and we are just finishing up sending thank you cards. I had all kinds of intentions to get them out earlier but then we waited nearly 2 months to get our professional photo proofs, then we had to pick a photo and order photo cards… and well here we are.
And yes, there were a few people whose small gifts/lack of gifts gave me a moment of pause, but they were seriously outweighed by people whose generousity blew us away so I managed to quell that train of thought relatively quickly. You can’t help but notice though, we ARE human.
Really?? Facepalm. Well, I totally feel like a jerk for waiting. My only consolation is that now I can include things people did for us AT the wedding inside their thank-you cards, and for the honeymoon registry gifts, I can actually talk about the experiences (“Thank you so very much for the kayak rental during our honeymoon, we saw a lot of bald eagles!” Etc.). Hopefully that will help make up for the fact that I am a raging JERK.
TOTAL JERK*!
* where “JERK” refers to anyone who does not follow the word as written by Miss Manners. This also makes me a full and complete jerk, since I did not get my thank you cards out within a month of the wedding. Oh and our invitations did not follow the proper wording guidelines, nor did we address anyone with their proper titles on the envelopes. We’re ultra jerks.
Ooh, yeah, the proper title thing. We didn’t do that either. Like, we addressed this one particular set of friends as Ricky Rickshaw and Sally Sasquatch.* We just got an invitation to THEIR wedding that was addressed us as Mr. & Mrs. Beau Ballyhoo. Oops.
I think we’ve just graduated from total jerks to Super Awful Jerktasticpants.
* Clearly, not their real names.
I think you can do it either way — open as they come or wait. Really I think it’s all based on how and when you want to do the thank yous. As long as you don’t dilly dally too long, no one will be upset about whether their thank you came before or after the wedding.
I’ve always kind of wondered how you deal with the no present folks and if you bring it up. I am afraid I will totally worry they had a card and it got lost, or worse, stolen. It’s good to hear that the worry fades. I hope if anyone doesn’t get a thank you that thinks they should will just bring it up to me and confirm whether or not I got their gift.
Also, is it at all possible that your beau’s friends’ gifts are in the mail? I’ve heard it’s acceptable to get a couple a wedding gift up to a year after the wedding.
I found this really interesting. My stance is that I don’t expect a gift (people are attending, spending money on clothes, travel, hotel etc, their presence is enough etc), though I would never turn up to a wedding without one as I’d consider that a bit rude. I’m not sure how I square this, really.
The last wedding I went to, the couple requested money for their honeymoon, if people wanted to give a gift. As they hadn’t set up any sort of function for this, we decided to give them £50 (about $80) in a card. Just before we left for the wedding, having a drink at the hotel we were in with some friends, we wrote the card. Turned out most of the people we were with hadn’t even got a card and if they had, were not giving any money. I think we embarassed them by putting money in – maybe they felt that they weren’t close enough friends with the couple or anything. But really, if you’ve been invited to the wedding then i think you qualify as close enough.
But then, maybe they don’t expect it either? Modern etiquette is a weird thing.
Like I say, I can’t really square it.
I totally hear you. I was all about our guests’ presence being enough until the gift thing started happening, and then everything went squirrelly. “Wait, we got them gifts for their wedding, and they didn’t even write a card? What?” And then it was downhill from there.
It’s crazy to hear how most of your friends hadn’t even gotten a card — it seems like auch a no-brainer thing to do. But then again, you’re right about modern etiquette. I like how things have grown more relaxed and less stiff and formal, but then again I’m just left plain confused about what’s right and wrong most of the time.
I’ll own up to something here.
I was a bridesmaid for a friend in January and I only gave them their wedding present 2 weeks ago.
My excuse is that I outlaid a lot of money for the wedding and travel and everything else I was flat out BROKE, no matter how I cut it. For months before and after the wedding. I was there for the important stuff but I just couldn’t give a gift until really recently. And I felt crappy about it.
The groomsmen may give gifts later.
But as you say, it’s not important compared to them being there on the day next to you both.
I think writing a note to everyone who came just to say ‘thanks for coming’ is a neat thing to do anyway. Because despite what most of this post implies, I am someone who likes courtesies.
Just to clarify: I was broke because I was hardly working not because of the wedding. But ultimately I had to put my need for food and shelter above buying a gift for two people whom I love.
Oh and I never receive thank you letters. Turns out my friends don’t write them.
See, I understand that. If someone had come up to me and said, hey, I’m sorry I couldn’t afford a gift, but I’m really happy to be here and I love you guys and I’ll get you something when I have more money, I would have been like, DUDE, are you serious, I love you too and don’t even bother. But I think it’s just the lack of… of any kind of expression that kind of hit me in the gut. I mean, I’m prone to doubting my self-worth as it is, but when there were a bunch of people that never even bothered to write a little note, I was just like, WAH, DO THEY EVEN LIKE US ANYMORE??
But back to the topic at hand — No thank you cards? Crazy! I was raised in a household where you gave people thank-you cards for, like, breathing, so it’s second nature to me. But the beau was raised the opposite way. It’s been tough adjusting to each others’ expectations.
I completely agree. I am one of those odd people who writes cards and says thanks. Who knew that other people don’t do that? God, I still write a thank you to my father’s mother for sending me something off the reader’s digest mailing list for my birthday, even though she hates me. It’s a courtesy and doesn’t take that long.
I have never received a thank you note for a gift I gave at a wedding. I will admit to being slightly miffed about that. (Not constantly, but when the subject comes up here, I remember feeling weird about it.) Australian brides and grooms, are you just rude or something?
But I’m someone who likes to write birthday cards that tell them how much I love the person and why and whatever damn else I feel like, so at least I have the cards cornered, even if I felt like a heel for taking so long to give my gift.
Thanks Lyn – I feel better now. For some reason I needed someone’s absolution about this one!
1- more polls! they are fun
2- I liked your AMH gif! I thought I had missed a joke somewhere though so i didn’t comment on it
also, the groomsmen should have atleast given cards. that is cheap and thoughtful. i was pretty overwhelmed by our gifts (especially from people who shouldn’t have given any) and surprised by people I didn’t even get a card from. weddings are a strange beast and bring out the awkward in guests too
Right on, lady. That’s the best way I’ve heard it put in a while. Weddings ARE strange beasts, and lord knows I was one of the awkward ones.
An impressive collection of tinfoil hats…hilarious. It’s pretty well known, nay, I say they wrestled with their consciences afterward, because they didn’t bring cards. That’s just courtesy…”Hey, thanks for paying for my dinner..” kind of consolation prize.
I agree with Lisa – strange beasts indeed…
Yeah, a card. A card! I think my feelings would have been wiped out with a nice little card. Because I’ve been broke before. I know weddings are a huge burden to guests in terms of clothes, travel, hotels, etc. I just want to know, I guess, that the person really DOES care about being there. That we all share a little common bond of caring like I thought we did. If that makes any sense…
you know, i seem to recall having read somewhere that you have up to a year to send a wedding gift. however, i just googled it really quickly and various sites proclaim waiting a year is “extremely poor etiquette” and gifts should be sent within 3 months.
but still: more gifts could arrive in the next couple of months.
a) that list is amazing
b) that your mother still HAS that list is also amazing
c) I don’t think it matters when you open the gifts, really. we did it as they came, and I FINALLY finished my thank-you notes just over 3 months after our wedding. It took a little longer than I had hoped it would, but I just needed a break!
d) We haven’t gotten a gift from my sister/MOH yet — she told me what she would give us, but has yet to follow through (it’s a check toward the photo booth we had). Not sure that we’ll ever get something from some of the wedding party folks, but they definitely paid enough to get here and be a part of things…
e) as for general guests, I agree that a card or some sort of token gift/acknowledgment would be nice…
f) you’re a gimp. (please tell me you know Wayne’s World. If not, disregard.)
Gah… I am so stressed about somethning gift related.
We had been sending thank you cards as we received presents leading up to the wedding.
But then, at the wedding, a lot of people brought things and we had to open them when we got back from the honeymoon.
Obviously, I don’t expect anyone to bring gifts. But my boss, who I am really close with, had asked me before the wedding whether she should bring something or have it shipped and I told her to bring it if that was more convenient.
When we opened the presents and finished the thank you list — no gift or card from boss. Uh OH! What if she brought it and it got lost? What if I don’t write a thank you note and she thinks I am the most selfish person ever. I can’t ask her about it, because then it looks like I’m fishing. But it I never ask, then she just assumes I’m a sucky person with bad manners whose mama didn’t raise her to write thank you notes! ahhhhhhhhhhhh….
I’ve debated saying something like “This is mortifying, and I’m only mentioning it because you asked about gifts before the wedding, but…” See — what do I say next? There is no good way to finish that sentence… “..but we didn’t see a gift from you and that didn’t seem right so I just wanted to check to see if you maybe you left a gift but it got stolen or something?” See? There is NO WAY I don’t sound like a total jerkface.
If anyone has any advice…. please to post it for me!
What a totally icky situation, I feel for you. What if you just wrote a card thanking her for coming? It might inspire her to ask how you liked the gift and there’s your opening. And even if it doesn’t, at least you’ve thanked her and she can’t think you’re a total jerk!
We got a (wonderful!) gift this week and we are approaching our one year anniversary. And I am—–(big, horrible admission of an awful thing spoiler alert)— still finishing our thank you notes.
SIGH. I knoooooooow.
Anyhow, I am admitting this just to say that 1) sometimes gifts come months later or even almost a year later, and 2) sometimes truly, deeply thankful brides feel so overwhelmed with gratitude that they know they could never properly express their thankfulness and they have WAY too many perfectionist tendencies to be helpful in this situation, so they cope by procrastinating….a lot. While feel extremely guilty.
Yep. It’s a problem. But yesterday and today I began another round of working on them. (I have done most of “my side”, and will be starting “his side” because my husband is unmotivated to write any, and I am mortified at our lack of writing them. So thank you notes writing sessions will probably take the weekend and maybe into next week too, since half of them (“his side”) have to be done in a foreign language and it takes a while. And I have consoled myself with the (thankfully more generous) old-school etiquette idea of having one year to send gifts after a wedding and one year to write thank yous. (And yes, I KNOW I am deluding myself about the thank yous, but it helps to keep the overwhelmed tears at bay….)
Anyhow, you might be surprised at who sends suddenly sends you a card or gift months from now. And you might be surprised who never does. People tend to be surprising. 🙂
Couple of things: my understanding was that a guests have up to six months after the wedding to send a gift. We went to a wedding of very dear friends last October, and didn’t get them their gift until March, I think, because we told them to let us know if there was a piece of furniture they really wanted, and we would hunt something down for them and refinish it all nice and pretty for them. So it took us a little bit of time. I felt weird being at the wedding without a gift, though.
As for thank you notes, when I planned my first wedding, my mom told me that I was not supposed to send thank you notes until after the wedding (it should look like you did not use the wedding gifts before the wedding, and that you took some time to open, use and think about the thank you before you mailed it off). So, I kept a log of the gifts and gift-givers, wrote the thank you notes as each gift arrived (so I wouldn’t have to do it all at once), but held onto the thank you notes until after we returned from the honeymoon, when I mailed them all at once. That way, if anyone compared notes with some other guest, no one would be there thinking, “Hey! I didn’t get a thank you note!” Worked like a charm.
This time, we’re asking that no one bring gifts.
I love that your parents received a massaging shower head. That’s brill.
We have a few no-gift givers. This includes D’s old room mate, who moved out and owed him a few grand (he couldn’t cut a check for the money he owes?). It’s not the amount of the gift so much as the total lack of acknowledgment. A card with warm wishes would let us know that we, and our marriage, is important to you – just as you’re important to us (which is why you were invited…duh.). Quite a few people didn’t get us so much as a card and it left me feeling sad. And questioning if they really care.
But the thing that really pisses the fuck out of me were the no-shows. It includes two plus-ones: my friend’s bf had knee surgery and she told me he couldn’t go days in advance (understood!) and then someone’s girlfriend who didn’t feel like driving to MA from VT. It also includes D’s mom’s friends – a couple who didn’t show up and sent us a card with “sorry we couldn’t make it”. Um. It’s not a fucking BBQ, people. It’s a wedding. It was flipping EXPENSIVE. We factored in your food and alcohol and paid a service fee based on the number of guests. You can’t just not show up b/c you don’t feel like it. FUCK!! I’m still so annoyed. It made me especially mad b/c, since we were on a strict guest-list-budget, inviting that couple meant not inviting other people who I really wanted – we had to invite this couple b/c his mom really wanted them there.
LAME!