The Evils of Save-the-date cards
Posted by admin on Aug 19, 2009 in Skully chat | 2 commentsI’m vehemently opposed to STDs. I mean Save-the-Date cards, although it never hurts to remind ourselves to practise safe sex. Practise a lot, if you’ve got the opportunity 
Save-the-Dates. I hates them. We didn’t send them out, and when my soon-to-be-wedded friends ask about them, I do my best to dissuade them from the STD madness.
Brides – on their eternal quest to satisfy their “guests” – send out Save The Dates to everyone who they’re considering inviting to the wedding, around a year to nine months in advance of the date, to let them know when their wedding date. Your thinking “that sounds reasonable, right? Won’t people want to know when my wedding will be? Won’t they want to plan in advance?”
Urgh.
The sad fact of the matter is that NO ONE – including your parents, best friends, relatives, next door neighbours and manicurists – is as excited about your wedding as you are. To you and your betrothed, it’s the most wonderful, magical day of your life up until that point. For your guests, it’s a big party. A big party they may have to fly halfway across the country to attend.
Yes, Save the Date cards are totally cute. Yes, it may be useful for SOME of your guests to know in advance the exact date of the wedding. But before you start doodling designs and pricing up bulk fridge magnets, take heed of these points:
Save-the-Dates are a waste of money:
STDs cost money to make, to print and to send. You could design them on your home computer to save money, but you still have to print them out and mail them off. For a wedding for 100 guests you might be looking at an extra $200 onto the budget just to send out these cards, more if you’re printing fridge magnets. Couldn’t you spend that $200 on something more useful?
Save-the-Dates are a waste of time:
I read a lot of wedding blogs and forums, and brides are always stressing. A year out from the wedding, they’re stressing about booking a venue, finding a photographer, and their STD cards. It takes most brides HOURS to design the cards (or source a designer), print them off, find all the addresses, address the envelopes, post them all off, and the field phone calls from confused guests. “Isn’t it a bit early to send invitations, yet, dear?”
You only have a limited allotment of time at your disposal. Use it wisely, on things that REALLY matter. Think of how many tickle fights or jam sessions you could have had with your fiance instead of coordinating the STDs.
Save-the-Dates are a waste of resources:
100 cards, 100 envelopes – all that ink and paper and dead trees. For what? It’s not as if your guests are going to keep your STD cards preserved between the pages of their family album. You didn’t think they would, did you? Oh dear.
Save-the-Dates are a waste of communication:
Sending a Save-the-date card in the mail – no matter how personalized and cute it is – deprives you of the opportunity to ring around or visit your relatives and friends and TALK to them about your wedding plans. If you know some people will have to book flights/accommodation early, ring them up or skype them and discuss their needs, and catch up with their lives. In this crazy world of internet and movies and TV and iPods we don’t spend nearly enough time interacting with the people who make our lives worthwhile. Skip the impersonal STD and go for a friendly phone call.
Save-the-Dates cause unnecessary hassles:
Imagine this, you’ve sent out 150 save-the-dates for your wedding a year away. Unfortunatly, you have a financial crisis and have to postpone the wedding by a few months, and halve the guestlist. You send out the invitations with the revised date and now you’re innundated by phone calls from irate relatives – “Which date is correct?” “We’ve already booked flights!”, “Why haven’t I recieved an invitation?” “What do you mean, I’m not invited now? I thought that card thing WAS the invitation?”
You could have avioded this whole mess by not sending Save-the-Dates. Plans change, dates move, guestlists get shuffled around.
So why do you need Save-the-Date cards? Is it because the bridal industry tells you so – right underneath their full-page glossy ad for personalized magnets started at $3 per person.
Beware, Skully readers, beware!
I agree, and yet disagree.
For almost every wedding I have ever been to, an STD was absolutely unnecessary. All they tell me is, “hey. Sometime in the future you’ll be getting a real invite to this thing.”
At the same time, I had a ton of people who WOULD HAVE made other plans for Halloween if I had not sent out STD’s way, way early.
So in summary – usually, these are pointless. Typically, an e-mail STD will do. If you are getting married on a Holiday, especially a holiday your friends like, they are indispensable — because much to the point in this post: you are the only one who cares about your wedding — which means countless guests are unaware that your wedding falls on Halloween no matter how often you tell them that, and YES … they ARE making other plans if you don’t communicate clearly up front with something they can post on their fridge.
I’ve already been told so several times by friends and family.
One other consideration: If you have something hanging around long enough, you’ll cease to notice it. I do it with dental appointment reminders all the time; I stick the date card on my corkboard and by the time the appointment rolls around six months later I’ve completely forgotten about it because the card has been there for so long it’s become background noise.
So you’ll have some percentage of guests who will carefully take note of your scheduled date and forget all about it by the time the date actually rolls around. (You’ll definitely have at least one if you invite me.)
When you make the initial phone call, you might consider getting everyone’s email address and then putting them on a “Wedding Newsletter” mailing list. If you send out a short monthly update about your plans it’ll not only let you share news with far-flung guests, it’ll keep refreshing their memory that your wedding is approaching. Then you only have to make reminder phone calls to the few people who aren’t wired.