Wedding Announcements: The Whys, Whos, and Whens

Let’s say that your budget didn’t allow inviting everyone and anyone to your wedding, but there are still members of your extended family and peer group who might want to know that you’ve tied the knot. Assuming these people are not close enough to you or your new spouse to have heard from you or your mother or your best friend’s mother’s coworker from the last company she worked at that you’re married, wedding announcements may come into play.

A wedding announcement is a bit like a wedding invitation with all of the scheduling info removed, in that it contains some of the same details and is frequently sent on stationery as fancy as the wedding invitations themselves. Note, however, that you don’t have to rock the ecru cardstock with black lettering if something more colorful would suit you better. The bride’s parents may have the “honour of announcing the marriage” of the new Mr. and Mrs. (or Mr. and Mr. or Mrs. and Mrs.) So-and-So, or not. A typical wedding announcement might read something like this:

Sometimes the people sending out the wedding announcement will include an at-home card, which is a very old fashioned thing but quite useful still. The at-home card serves to let the recipient of the wedding announcement know the newlyweds’ address, when they’ll take up residence if one or both of them is moving house, and whether someone (usually the bride, but these are modern times!) has changed their name. An at-home card might read:

Now to address the matter of who gets what. Wedding announcements should only be sent to the people who you can reasonably say will really want to know that you are now hitched. While your parents’ friends may be a stretch, there is a surprisingly good chance that at least some of them will want to know (especially if they have seen you recently or knew you when you were tiny). Indeed, you’d probably be shocked and flattered at who is excited that someone has finally made an honest (wo)man of you!

Send your wedding announcements off only after the wedding has taken place. I won’t say it’s a hedge against cold feet, but brides- and grooms-to-be do occasionally change their mind at the last second. The right time to have wedding announcements sent — ask the MOG or MOB to do this for you — is on the day of the wedding or the day after the wedding. Speaking realistically, the best time to send them is probably sometime in the week after you return from your honeymoon, preferably after you’ve recovered from spending days and days drinking complimentary rum runners under a blazing hot sun.

Last, but certainly not least, wedding announcements should not include any sort of registry information. In fact, including wedding registry information in announcements could be seen as rather crass since the recipient of the announcement wasn’t invited to the wedding. It reads like: “We got married, you weren’t invited, please send a gift!” I’d never suggest you meant that, of course, but registry information in a wedding announcement can easily be interpreted that way.