A Piece of Paper with an Abstract Noun
I am of course talking about the wedding invitations.
Invented by the rich in collaboration with calligraphy savvy monks in the 1600s, this way of communicating the day of all days is still going strong and speaking for myself, there is something special about sending a personal, physical letter.
Now, society's rich and the men of God were not first with inventing the actual invite... that started a little earlier... about 200 years earlier and evolved from there.
1400s - the town crier announced the marriage.
Most people could not read or write during this time, so you paid a vocally strong person to get out in the town and yell to people that you are getting married, and anyone who heard this was welcome to come.
In today´s society, this is inconvenient because:
A - The person is screaming (a lot of things can be going on there)
B - Anyone can come... Do we really want that?
C - Who will hear him through the songs in peoples heads?
1600s - Newspaper announcements or mezzotint (printmaking process) invitations with tissue paper.
This reduced the number of people down to all who could read, but still, a lot of people were invited.
Pros & Cons:
A - People who can´t read might not show up, like small kids, people who have misplaced their glasses or the ones who simply did not get the newspaper that day.
B - At least no one is walking around in town screaming all day.
1800s - Invitations were hand-delivered by the postal service in double envelopes.
Why this could work in today's society:
You get to invite specific guests that you actually know or have heard of (always a plus). But double envelopes? Hello, we are eco-warriors today - one envelope is enough, thank you!
2000s - Email, text, GIF, post, blog, vlog - whatever.
The sky is the limit in today's society to make sure that your guests will attend your day + the invites can become unique and individual, just like you.
The downside could be that anyone born before 2000 may not know what an email, text, GIF, post, blog or vlog is.
For our wedding, we have chosen the classic and somewhat reliable - snail-mail.
Is there anything greater than getting a formal invitation on perfectly colour coordinated stationery?
A person's valuable time has gone into inserting and folding, leaving traces of saliva and other forms of DNA that any mad genius scientist could use to cook up a new HS.
The options for your invites are eternal, so are all the types of websites that can provide this for you, from ready made to custom made.
When asking Google where to look, I landed on this site:
https://www.zazzle.co.uk/s/wedding+invitations
They have great prices and offers - we landed a 50% discount on our order, so it was kinda meant to be. Here you can create your very own unique style with colours to go with your wedding theme (rose and gold for us) and when you are done you can preview the invitation to see what it will look like IRL. Depending on how quick you want the order to arrive at your door step, shipping time is between 2-18 business days.
When it comes to how an invite should be written and what information is needed, Google, again, will offer you everything you need (it always does). Just search for wedding invitations and go to Images and you will find a cascade of inspiration, as well as beautiful fonts to go with it.
For our wedding, we are going with a classy/elegant theme so we wanted the text to align with that, and to make it even more formal, we chose to skip some numbers and write it with letters instead... Absolutely gorgeous!
For our envelopes, we chose to only use one per invitation (seems fair enough), in ivory and gold.
We try to order from local businesses as much as possible, to support the best we can in the Covid aftermath. - https://www.bestbuyenvelopes.ie/
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