two thousand and wait a minute

So the lovely (and newly affianced!) Karah of bellabykarah.com and I have been working our butts off to get the invitations finished. I've spent a lot more time than I thought I would coming up with the exact wording of the most important awesome party of my life.

When I got engaged I never thought that figuring out what words to use would be harder than figuring out what invitations to use!

If my mom had it her way the invitation (and the whole wedding!) would be very formal. According to her and all the etiquette books, since my parents are paying for the wedding, our invitations should read (names have been changed):

Mr & Mrs Blah Blah Blah III

request the honour of your presence

at the marriage of their daughter,

Blah Blah

to

Mr. Blah Blah Blah

son of 

Blah & Blah Blah

on Friday the tenth of October

two thousand and eight

...and so on and so forth in way too many words.

There was NEVER a time where I even so much as considered using an invitation like that for my wedding. Even when I was young I always thought that kind of wording was totally lame. No one talks like that, why are you putting on airs and pretending to be something your not just because you're getting married? Isn't this an invitation for a ceremony that is supposed to represent the state of your relationship thus far? And I know for a fact that our relationship would never "request the honour of your presence" no matter how much we wanted you there.  Our relationship would never refer to ourselves by our full names- our relationship rarely ever even uses our first names!  And our relationship would certainly never spell out the year 2008. In fact, our relationship gets ANGRY when it sees dates and times spelled out completely in words!!!!

When I first started planning the invites I found myself actually stressing over the wording of the invitation, I even  googled the proper way to word a wedding invitation. And then when I started the first draft I caught myself actually spelling out "two thousand and" wait a minute!!! What am I doing!?

And that's when I came to terms with the fact that there's no reason why your invitation can't be as personable and easy-going as your relationship. It's okay to have an informal wedding invitation to a wedding. In fact, I think informal invitations are friendlier and lot more, well... inviting!

In the end I decided to word our invitation as such:

Please join

Megan & Aaron

as they exchange their marriage vows

Friday, October 10th, 2008

at sunset

on Keawakapu beach

Maui, Hawaii

reception & rock'n'roll to follow

When Aaron saw the last sentence he started shaking his head and said "your such a nerd." "Oh no, do you not like it?" I had totally thought it was something he would appreciate. But then he started laughing and said, "No, it's perfect!" And we high-fived. 

And that is why you will never be cordially invited to anything we do.

as a side note- 

It's nice to know that I'm not alone in this wedding revolution. The Offbeat Bride blog has been playing a major part in easing my anti-traditional wedding anxiety. Especially when I stumbled upon their wedding invitation wording that won't make you barf entry.
YAY for that! No one likes to barf.