The Headache of Choice
by Melissa Worden
As
a bride-to-be, the most difficult first step of preparing for the wedding
wasn’t deciding on which dress to choose, or what colors would be incorporated
for the event. It was choosing what would best represent my soon-to-be husband,
our families, and me, as invitations.
My
husband-to-be, my future mother-in-law, and I all met at a local party supply
store. What lay before us was much more of an undertaking than we originally
thought. The store clerk led us back to a small section of the store with
a large table and a few chairs. The entire back side of the table was covered
with more than twenty thick catalogs! We were left to fend for ourselves,
with no idea of where to start or which catalog to look at first.
My
mother-in-law, being the go getter that she is, picked up a catalog and started
flipping through the pages. We had already discussed what we were looking
for, previous to going to the store.
What
we had in mind was a little less formal than the average invitation, but still
nice enough to attract our friends and family to come. We didn’t want anything
too religious or frilly, and we wanted something that would reflect our combined
families, all without being too pricey. After looking through at least ten
catalogs, we started to notice that many of them repeated the same designs,
only replacing the verbiage on the inside of the invitations. We finally settled
on a design we had seen in several of the books, after deciding that we weren’t
going to find anything less formal without having to pay for the extra postage
due to size.
After
thinking back on the entire planning process, we would have been better off
having our invitations custom made. I wasn’t completely happy with the invitations
we had, and when we got them from the printers, half of our reply cards had
been printed wrong. We almost sent them out that way, but luckily caught the
mistake after being halfway done putting the postage on them.
With
a custom invitation, we could have had the style we wanted, with the verbiage
we wanted, without the hassle of finding what we wanted ourselves. At that
point, the cost would have not been an issue because the headache of trying
to find something we could agree on would have been eliminated.
I
have several friends that are planning weddings now. When they ask me about
the best place to go for invitations, I advise them to go to a place that
works with their wants and needs, rather than one that sits you in a room
with catalogs and lets you go at it yourself. Planning a wedding is already
hard enough without having so many choices to make about an invitation. It
should be easier than picking out your dress or colors, not a headache with
an ocean of catalogs to spend hours sifting through.
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Melissa Worden is an author on Writing.Com, which is located at ( http://www.Writing.Com/ ) and is accessible by anyone. You can see more of her work at http://www.writing.com/authors/mworden .