Whom to invite to a wedding is something of a diplomatic relation job. Some people do it in a workman like manner.
The groom is asked to provide a list of his preferred guests, with their address and phone number. A similar list is worked out by the bride. If parents are actually going to be involved, the parents of the bride and groom will provide another list of their preferred guests.
Eventually the the four lists are reviewed for duplication, at which time the real job begins. Now it is a matter of making sure that while the list is paired down to accommodate a realistic number of guests, it will reflect the real desires of all concerned. While it sounds simple enough, it never is.
If, for example, the groom's side of the family has, and wants to invite three times as many guests as the bride's side of the family, it’s a question of shall we have a huge wedding at which most of the guests belong to the groom’s side, or shall we have a small wedding which will represent equally each side of the family. This is, of course, when money is no object and the situation only requires the choice to be made clear.
Weddings in the early days tended to be much simpler, and often didn’t require any invitations as we understand them. Since communities were small, it was inevitable that everyone in the district knew when a marriage was a foot.
That being the case, people would not be so foolhardy as to hold a wedding without inviting all their neighbours. They could hardly expect their neighbour to forget the omission when the neighbour’s daughter married the next year.
Even if your neighbours were the type of people you didn’t particularly want to cultivate as friends, since travel was not a matter of jump on a plane and be there an hour later, if you didn’t have your neighbours over to celebrate with you, you’d end up with no guests at all.
So, in effect, a wedding in the district was assumed to be the district’s wedding, and everyone was automatically invited by virtue of living in the district. There was no formal invitation. People just arrived. And if it trapspired that on the day you found that your guests weren't as many as you hoped for, you might send your servants out to all the the local establishments and invite perfect strangers to come and have some free beer instead of having to pay for it.
The emphasis was not so much on who you invited, but that you used your celebration as a sort of announcement of your good fortune to all and sundry. |
