Wedding Invitations, part 1

And so... my search for affordable, acceptable invitations begins.

As some of you might know, most standard Filipino wedding invites are huge in comparison to American ones. See this:

A version of the standard Philippine wedding invite.
Invitation in the center, bridal entourage list on the left. (holy cow! there's a lot of people!)

 There's a separate page for the invite itself and a page for the wedding entourage as well.  The reason for this is because traditional Philippine weddings incorporate the following:

1. The wedding party is usually huge because of people known as sponsors.  Sponsors are a big deal to some Filipinos, at least the ones that I know who care about weddings.  In the case of my wedding - all of the ones that I know really care about sponsors but I'm trying not to generalize.  Sponsors are generally involved in parts of the ceremony, such as the veil, candle, and cord part.
2. Being a sponsor in my Philippine world is considered a nice way to honor family members and close family friends.
3. These sponsors, in addition to the names of people in the bride & groom's party, get their names listed in the invitation and usually walk down the aisle as well.  There might be some other stuff they do but this highly varies by wedding. 

Many American invites, I'm told, are not like this at all.  I actually didn't know this prior to my engagement because I've only received invitations to Philippine weddings thus far in my life.  I'm quite sheltered in this sense. My experiences outside of this norm were with receptions that American friends have had in which the invites were very  D-I-Y.... a great option for those who are creative - not so great for people like me who can barely draw stick figures.

So anyway, I had this idea in my head that blowing money on wedding stationary meant having to invest in 2-page long invites, 4+ different cards with information on them, and possibly having to send to the Philippines for materials.

I had a brief explosion of happiness when my fiance informed me that many American wedding invites are only a page long. Research online confirmed this. I was determined to try to figure out a way to make my invites only a page long and realized that there would be no way I could do this without cutting out the "wedding entourage" list entirely.  I really wanted to make this work since I was planning on doing online invites with paper copies for the non-tech folks.

All of the online invite services I'd seen so far could not properly accommodate a 2-page invite. Hmmm...

Could I cut this list out entirely? I thought. Maybe I'll just put it in the programs. Oooh, I could just nix having sponsors entirely and save myself a ton of drama. We're not even having a Catholic wedding anyway.

I decided to give my mom a buzz to run this idea by her. Since the company on my side will primarily be Filipino, I needed to make sure that cutting sponsors out of the invite wouldn't offend any of the various Titas or start tongues wagging on the nearest phone call to Tarlac.

In summary, Mom wants the sponsors on the invite: "It's important so dat I can hooonor da people who know us like your Tita Baby and Tito Edgar. And da ones kaming prom da Philippines." I briefly entertained the idea of pushing my thoughts on this one but decided to drop it. It was only recently that she had gotten past the idea of us nixing the Catholic church wedding. Best not to push my luck on something that's pretty low on the priority scale.  Since we'll have having elements of a traditional Filipino (Roman Catholic) wedding in ours and I've already set Mom's expectations for this, I can't see a way to easily nix this.

(Note to engaged couples:  For your wedding, remember to pick your battles! I've learned that it's not worth trying to push your way on every single thing.  Save that energy for the stuff that is truly important to you and your partner. In my case, having the ceremony the way that we both want it is important to me. That meant having to work through a explosive discussion with my mother and Nanay (lola) but it needed to be done so that they could understand that a cathedral wedding, which is possible through a family connection, was not in the cards for us. This is still a work in progress!)

On the cool side, she apparently knows that some of these people use the internet frequently and would not mind receiving an online invite or doing an online RSVP. Perhaps I can call that the "American" version of our invitation. I can probably still save money since I won't have to print as many paper versions of the invites. Sounds like a good compromise to me.