Wedding Invitations - the Most Important Invitation of Your Life

Weddings are sacred, emotional, celebratory, and eternally significant to the couple getting married. For those reasons, wedding invitations are more important than other types of invitations. Birthdays happen every year, anniversaries are like icing on the cake, Christmas comes around once per year, and the others are all annual holidays. A wedding, however, stands alone in that it happens on a single day of the year, and the effects last a lifetime – and probably beyond. Besides the wedding cake, flower arrangements, wedding wear, caterers, location, and choice of a wedding planner, the wedding invitations are extremely important.

Some people save wedding invitations. That’s right. The date, day, time, location, cordial welcome, RSVP, and optional clothing and gift recommendations are not the only thing conveyed by the invitations. It’s also important to let the visitors and guests know how important your wedding is to you and your spouse. The colors, price, and special effects (more on those later) of the invitation signify tone, mood, and importance. Furthermore, grandparents and others may like to keep the cards because of their sentimental import. Priceless is the word that comes to mind.

Weddings are once-in-a-lifetime ceremonies that need the same level of wedding invitations. Think not only of yourself in designing the invitations. Think of the guests receiving them. You may adore pink and black, but the guests may feel cheated by such inept invitations. Don’t confuse the guests with tacky, corny, lowbrow, odd, or cryptic cards. It needs to be well understood exactly what event you’re hosting. Keep your guests on a comfortable level. Make the invitations appropriate. Calligraphy, embossed text, and ribbons are far superior to glitter, comic fonts, and pop-out 3D bride and groom characters. The last point is a controversial one.

In recent years, wedding invitations have added special effects with 3D pop-out characters, e.g., a wedding cake, the bride and groom, or a lavish paper ring. These kinds of gimmicks are construed as funny, offensive, or inappropriate – depending on the guests’ tastes. Some guests may adore them, and others might take offense. After all, differing ideas of marriage are present in all levels of our culture. Keep the tone of the invitations serious and happy, and you’ll be all right. They need to be serious in the sense of a lifelong commitment and a transformational stage of growth, and they need to have a happy mood in the sense of deep fulfillment, gratitude, and joy that it brings you, your spouse, and both of your extended families.