Invitation Addressing "Etiquette"

by Stephanie
This is a totally random post, but after spending all day addressing invitations I just wanted to write (rant) about the "etiquette" of doing so.

First, I think the idea that you MUST hand address your invitations is a little out dated. Danny and I decided that after ALL the HOURS of work we have put into our wedding invitations (since we are making them entirely ourselves) the last thing we wanted was for our messy handwriting on the envelope to ruin the whole presentation.

The traditional "reason" for hand addressing the invitations is so that the recipient feels like you put time and care into the invitation, and it is supposed to make them feel "special."

Well, I can honestly tell you that it takes me MORE time to type out each person's address and hand feed one envelope at a time through my printer than it would just to write out the address by hand lol. So everyone should feel very special that I took the insane amount of time to figure out a template in Photoshop to address the invitations, pick the exact color teal to print the addresses with, figured out the right specifications to give the printer so it printed exactly where on the envelope I wanted it to, and that I took the hours to type and print one envelope at a time! :-)

Also, with the fancy fonts you can purchase these days it isn't like you are addressing the envelope in Times New Roman and sticking a white address label on the envelope!

And besides...we could not find a SINGLE pen (other than a sharpie) that would write on the envelope material we have. I figure printing a beautiful address via the computer would be much better than addressing your wedding invitations in sharpie! :-)

The other thing I find really funny about the addressing "etiquette" is that SO many "credible" authorities on "etiquette" all contradict each other! Some places say that you are supposed to spell out "Mister" and "Misses" and some places say never to do so. Some say that if a woman keeps her maiden name then she is to be addressed as "Ms." not "Mrs." and some places say that either is fine.

So after spending a couple hours sorting through all the different opinions on how to address the invitations I decided that I really don't care lol. I am spelling out "Mister" and "Misses" because I like how it looks on the invitations better than the abbreviations lol. I think I used "Mr. & Mrs." on the save the dates because the envelopes were those little tiny ones, but our Invitation envelopes are HUGE so using the abbreviations looks really silly and not proportional to the size of the envelope.

Anyway, I can't imagine that the people we are inviting to our wedding would be so stuck up and snooty, that they would be offended over the fact that we spelled out "Mister and Misses" lol. And if they are...oh well! I guess I would just hope that people would have better things to think/talk about than how we addressed our wedding invitations lol.

I guess after reading tons of the wedding etiquette books I am starting to get a little annoyed at all the things they say MUST be done a certain way or EVERYONE will think your wedding was horrible, and a disaster, and tacky, and the joke of the century lol. Why should other people care how WE do OUR wedding? Especially some of the small little things like whether or not you spell out "Mister" on an invitation.

I figure it is up to Danny and me to decide which wedding traditions and etiquette things matter to US. For example: We decided that we are not going to do a receiving line at the church, or a father daughter dance, or a live band, or a seating chart, all of which are things that the etiquette books say are a MUST for your wedding not to suck lol. We don't want everyone to stand around in a receiving line when they could be at the reception site having a drink and playing some games. My dad doesn't like to dance so why would I force him to do an awkward father daughter dance? We want to play lots of different types of music so we are having a DJ play an iTunes play list that we are putting together. And lastly, we figure that people are grownups enough that they can figure out how to pick their own seat at the reception!

What do you guys think? Which traditions/etiquette things did you decide to do away with for your weddings?

And they lived happily ever after...