Your Bridal Party Only
Your Bridal Party and Immediate Family
Who Cares! Everyone is invited!!
A few nights ago Groomzilla and I began discussing where we wanted to host our rehearsal dinner. My original thought would be to have the dinner at a more causal location where we can invite all of our bridal party, our immediate family including aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. and since we will have quite a few out of towners, we wanted to extend the invite to those that happen to be in town the night before our wedding.
Unfortunately by including all of those people can quickly turn into another small wedding. I definitely want everyone to be together and to be able to see them AS LONG as possible that weekend but I'm not sure we will be able to pull this off. First by finding a "casual" location that will allow us to bring in an outside caterer and Second by finding a restaurant that we will be able to feed and drink all these people within our budget.
So..who did your rehearsal dinner invite list consist of?? Was it intimate or bustling with friends and family?
I'd love to hear from you. Email questions, comments, or photos to blogzillabride@gmail.com
16 comments:
I don't have any answers to your questions but this is a major concern of mine as well. We have a small bridal party but there are other ceremony participants. I know it is customary to invite out-of-town guests but we'll have a bunch. I'm thinking we may just have to go out for pizza.
My good friend just had some finger food at a bar. You do what you can do.
Have the rehearsal dinner for all those that are involved with the wedding from 6:30-8:30 and then let people know where you will be afterwards so you can enjoy the company of all your out of town guests.
This was a bit of a challenge for us, as well. We ended up inviting the bridal party, immediate family and out-to-town relatives to dinner at an Italian restaurant. Since our wedding guest list was limited to 75 people to begin with, this helped us keep it under 30 people at the dinner.
We're having ours at the bowling alley in our community! :) It's going to be tottaly casual! His mom is supplying the hamburgers, hot dogs and cost of the facility and everyone in both of our families are making side dishes! We're having our bridal party and all of our immediate family! I think it will be so much more fun that way! They get their $32 per plate meal the next night haha! :)
We had ours at a restaurant where reserved a private room. We invited our parents and wedding party and their spouses only for dinner. The restaurant had a small bar attached, so we put on our wedding website that anyone who would be in town that night could join us at the bar after our rehearsal dinner. That way we kept the rehearsal dinner small and private but still had a chance to see our out-of-towners!
We had only the wedding party & spouses, immediate family, parents, and those in the wedding. This quickly added up to 40 people. Then we told people to meet us after at a bar. The rehearsal dinner is such a hard call and especially for you because you will have SO many out of town guests. Could you do something like PJ did? That worked out really well and it was FUN!
I'm trying to take the easy way out on this one. It's going to only be wedding party members and informal wings and pizza at the house. Nothing too elaborate.
that's always hard. we're inviting wedding party (and spouses), out of town family (not all, just some), immediate family. that makes us having a large rehearsal (about 65 people) but then again we're inviting about 350 people. hope this helps!
The best rehearsal dinner I've been to was my sister's and we had the same problem- everyone was coming in from out of town so we wanted to spend time with them but we were looking at around 60 people. So we rented the clubhouse in our condo association and everybody just cooked the day of the rehearsal at my house and we walked it over ahead of time. It was perfect because there was a kitchen, we brought in the food ourselves so it didn't cost a fortune, and we could hang out for as long as we wanted. It was really nice for the older generation who hadn't seen each other in years.
Oh, and I meant to send you this link earlier (this is Anna from Anything Sews by the way) but my friend does calligraphy so if you want to hand off this lovely task, she's your girl! Here's the link:
http://calligraphiabymelissa.com/index.html.
We are probably having it super casual and at a bowling alley because we love bowling...or we are having it at a pizza place.
The list usually goes like this
Parents/Grandparents
Siblings
Bridal Party & their dates
For us it will only be about: 25 people. :-)
You can't really expect it much bigger or it is like another wedding.
I only had my wedding party and immediate family. We catered in Rib Crib and paid for an extra hour at the chapel/reception. If you really want to go low key/stress free, my sister booked a private room at Pizza Hut. Honestly, I was so nervous for the next day that I didn't care what people ate. It was MY day :)
Oh my word, the rehearsal dinner is one of the farthest things from my mind right now! I think we'll just order pizzas and call it a day! Haha.
I wanted a small rehearsal dinner so we didn't end up with a mini wedding as well. Plus my mom didn't want her immediate family to feel like they had to come (there are a lot of them and all live sort of local). H's grandma insisted that her OOT family come so our rehearsal dinner ended up being a weird mix of bridal party, immediate family, and then a few cousins from H's side.
PS I changed my URL update your reader to: http://murphdogslaw.blogspot.com
I've attended both types - just the bridal party, and then ones where it's BP plus significant others. For ours - the guest list will be up to MR. ST's parents - as they are paying for it!
We have the same problem, there are a good 40 out of town guests, all of them really from his side. I had hoped to just have a small bridal party-immediate family type of thing, but no. So I'm not sure what we'll do, although I have had a few friends just throw or plan to throw a super casual backyard BBQ at a nearby family member's home. But then you need them to agree to it!
Post a Comment