How to Control Your Wedding Guest List

Your wedding guest list is one of the very first things to tackle once you get engaged. Sure, it might not be fun to simply list names on a piece of paper – but knowing a rough headcount will help you plan ahead and find the right venue, set the right budget, and make the right choices as you plan your Big Day.

Your guest list is also one of the most expensive items on your entire list of to-do’s as well – precisely because they will majorly influence your venue, the kind of wedding you want, and so on.

How do you keep the guest list under control, then? What are some of the most important things to know when you want to shorten your guest list as much as possible?

Talk to your parents from the very beginning. Parents tend to get really excited for their children’s weddings, and, in all this excitement, they sometimes forget that their children should have an actual say in who all attends. If your parents are paying (and even if they aren’t), be sure to discuss with them the matter of the guest list. Allow them to invite a fixed number of people – and explain to them very clearly why you don’t want more people invited.

Establish some ground rules for yourselves. For instance, don’t invite to the wedding anyone you haven’t seen in real life over the past one or two years. Or, don’t invite relatives you haven’t seen since you were in third grade. Discuss this with your fiancé and decide your own ground rules to make sure you keep your guest list under control.

Ask yourselves: would you be actually sad if a person couldn’t make it to the wedding? If the answer is yas, then add this person to the list. But if your answer is negative, you most likely don’t actually want to invite that person to the wedding. This is an easy way to filter out the wedding guest list and come up with a list of people you genuinely want to celebrate your love story with.

No matter what method you may choose to control your guest list for the Big Day, remember this: do what makes you happy. For some, this means a big wedding with hundreds of guests. For others, it means a small and intimate event. You set your own rules!

4 Wedding Roles You Can Assign Friends Who Aren’t in the Wedding Party

Your wedding day is a once in a lifetime kind of event. The kind of event where you want to be surrounded by your loved ones – by the friends close to your heart, by the family who always showed you their love.

However, you cannot include everyone in the wedding party – for numerous reasons, as you will see in the tips we have gathered below. Why is that – and how to make your friends feel included even if they aren’t in the actual wedding party?

We have some tips for you – so read on and find out more.

Having a very big wedding party is all well and fine – but do keep in mind that this can be costly (for you as much as it is for them) and that it can very easily get out of control if they don’t all know each other and communicate effectively with each other. In general, wedding party size is determined by the number of guests too, so if you’re having a smaller or medium-sized wedding, you might want to avoid having a wedding party that’s too large.

There are many other roles to assign friends who aren’t in the wedding party, though. For instance, you could ask someone to give a reading during the wedding ceremony. This is a really nice gesture to make for someone you are actually close to (and may have even wanted them in the wedding party, but they couldn’t get involved too much).

Furthermore, you could also ask a friend to give a speech at the wedding. Traditionally, the Best Man is obliged to give a speech on behalf of the “friends” at the wedding. However, that doesn’t mean you cannot ask someone else to do it as well.

Does your friend have any special talent? Maybe they make the best cookies in a three-state area. Or maybe they sing heavenly. Or maybe they are just great with telling jokes and could pull off a one-man show moment. Regardless of what it is, asking them to have a special moment at your wedding is a wonderful way of showing them how much you care about them (plus, extra-entertainment will be appreciated by everyone!).

Your wedding, your rules. As long as your ideas aren’t offending to anyone at the wedding, feel free to let your creativity roam wild – you will not regret it!

These Wedding Photos Are Really Must-Haves

Wedding photography is simply magical. While your day might only last for a few hours and while your memory might be able to “record” all the tiny (and beautiful!) details of this special events, photography is there to help you keep those memories fresh for the rest of your lives.

Wedding photos are more than just captures of an event, though. They tell a visual story the same way artistic paintings and sculptures talk about philosophy, politics, and society.

What are some of the wedding photos you should definitely include in your album, though?

We have some tips for you to make sure all your bases are covered.

The Getting Ready - This is a candid capture of the emotion and nervousness before the Big Day. A lot of couples only include pictures of the bride getting ready, but it’s really nice when the groom’s nervousness is captured too – it looks very nice in the wedding album when both pictures are put side by side.

The Portraits - Before you shoot a romantic portrait together, ask your photographer to shoot portraits of both of you separately. Again, it will complement the entire visual story told by your wedding album and it will make everything more genuine and candid.

The Wedding Party - These guys and gals have been there for you since you said “yas” to that pretty ring on your finger. They surely deserve a couple of photos just for them. These pictures are usually fun and youthful, so let them go wild (literally) if you want to achieve the best photos!

The Walk - The moment you walk down the aisle is amazing. There will be a lot of nervousness involved, there will be tears (yours and your guests), and there will be pure magic floating in the air. Ask your photographer to capture all this – and don’t forget to ask him to capture your groom’s face when he sees you for the first time as a bride too.

The Firsts - The First Kiss, the First Dance, the First Look, the Cutting of the Cake – these are parts of your wedding story. They add to the candid feeling of the album and they make it feel complete. They are the kind of pictures that will make you smile one day, thirty years from now when you will be looking back at your Big Day.

No matter what kind of pictures you decide to take, allow your personality to shine through – it’s the best way to make sure your pictures are 100% unique!