The Guest List Boogie

Call me crazy, but just a matter of days (maybe only one day, my memory is fuzzy) after getting engaged to Katelyn, I had already begun thinking about my list of people to invite.  Now, this might be a little out of sequence according to most wedding planning suggestions, as in essence I was making a guest plan well before I knew what sort of number we would be able to accomodate at our venue.  Now that we're close to having that venue in place, it seems particularly important to talk about it here; even though I know many of you are waiting with baited breath for that venue announcement.

The issue of a guest list began to really hit home when I found that, upon first thoughts, I was already at around 80 potential guests; on my side of the family alone.  Katelyn's mother had begun a list as well, with a number coming out in the 60-70 guest range, even before Katelyn considered college friends and non-family-members to invite.  The guest list; it is an important and complicated dance.

It is also a deceptive dance, for the first 20 guests or so come quite easily.  Immediate family members go down first, then grandparents (of which I have none still living, so that simplifies planning at the very least), then uncles, aunts, and cousins.  My mother was an only child, so that also simplifies things a little bit because she has no extremely close relatives such as brothers or sisters; in their stead, however, we have her cousins and their family members.  My father was the youngest of four children, so incorporating members of those families adds to the list as well.

One also has to consider themselves (as many brides and grooms neglect to include themselves on the guest lists and then order exactly 2 fewer chairs or meals than they need for their wedding) and the members of the wedding party.  I have a best man who is a plus-one, my brother as a groomsman who will be married by the time of my wedding, and another groomsman who has a plus-one.  On my newest revision of the guest list, completed this morning, the Family and Wedding Party category had 27 names; about four of those could be considered only "possible" in terms of attending.

The next category I considered was my friends that I would like to have in attendance; after all, this is at least partially my party, and I'm going to invite who I want to be there.  The list is made up of a few high school friends and a bunch of people I met through my college years, all people who would make the wedding an enjoyable day.  At the end of this category, Brian's Friends, I had compiled 21 names, bringing the guest list total to that point to 48 people.

And, as my final category, I took into consideration friends of my family.  These include friends of both parents, as well as co-workers.  Once this category of the list was completed, Parker Family Friends, I'd added another 21 names to bring my total up to 69 people (oh snap).  The best part of the list, to me, was that of those 69 people, I'm close enough to all of them where I wouldn't feel awkward having them attend the wedding and I wouldn't feel as though they'd be caught by surprised to be on my list of invitees.  At the same time, if absolutely necessary, I feel as though I could go through the difficult process of culling the invite list down to a more manageable number with the appropriate apologies.

The difficulty of coming up with a guest list, however, is that once my list is complete, we are far from complete in terms of who needs to be invited.  Katelyn's current guest list, which is a work in process in coordination with her family, currently stands at about 96 people.  Combined together with my current list, we're looking at sending invites out to 165 people.

This does raise logistical issues, certainly.  For the entirety of our venue search, we were visiting places with a speculative attendance number of 120-130 people.  These were also the guiding numbers that we were using to narrow down which venues we were going to seek out for further information in the first place.  We are nearly ready to make the down payment on our venue to reserve our wedding date next year, but concerns over this number of invites have rained on the happiness of locking down a venue because we need to consider the feasibility of said venue for our potential numbers.

And it is the potential numbers that prove most problematic in planning a wedding.  Out of the 69 people on my guest list to invite, nearly all of those people live in Maine and nearly all of those people would be willing and able to show up for the ceremony and reception.  For Katelyn's 96 people, there is much more ambiguity as to who would be able to travel to Maine for the ceremony and who would have to respectfully and regretfully decline our invitation.  It is this ambiguity and uncertainty that provides us with the most headaches in terms of trying to convince ourselves that we can produce a floor plan (thank goodness for Katelyn's architecture background) that can reasonably accomodate the potential number of attendees, especially since our preferred venue trends a little towards the small side in terms of interior accomodations.

Counting the new guest list I drafted this morning, I have now gone through five different revisions of my guest list; some with drastic cuts in the event of a large influx of Katelyn's out-of-state relatives, some even longer than the 69 I came to this morning.  The guest list is a tricky dance, and the music is far from over.  There are still many moves to go before the band pauses for a recess, and my feet are getting tired.