Invitation Etiquette

A few days ago, my mom called me up to inform me that we've been invited to attend a relative's birthday party. I had to politely decline even when I know that the location is just nearby. We were invited the day before the party so I made up excuses that we had to be someplace else. The truth is, I hate impromptu invites.

Traditionally, invitations should be sent out eight weeks before the event. I think that this is especially applicable to wedding invitations. When we got married, our printer had a problem and was not able to deliver our invitation cards on time. To make up for their shortcoming, they gave us Save The Date cards to distribute to guests while we were waiting for all of our invitations to be printed out. That way, our guests were able to fix their schedules and reserve the date to attend our event. By the way, the formal invitation cards were distributed two weeks after the Save The Date cards were given out.

For birthdays and other more simpler events, however, I prefer that I'll be informed at least two weeks in advance. Of course, I need to adjust my schedule and prepare a gift for the celebrator. Two weeks sounds fair, don't you think? By the way, how do you feel about electronic invites? When Rap celebrated his 10th Birthday last May, I was only given a month to prepare everything from scratch. The first thing I did, after we decided about the date, time, and location, is to create a Facebook event page for it. It gave me the chance to invite relatives and friends who had Facebook accounts. I followed up through emails and texts. Guess what? The party was a success! We had guests from as far as Laguna. I was also able to invite our former neighbors and Rap's former playmates. For me, sending and receiving electronic invites are ok as long as they still give the attendees two weeks to prepare for the event.

How about RSVP's? Do you religiously reply to an invitation with the RSVP tag? I do. Literally translated, RSVP or Respondez S'il Vous Plait means "Please reply." Whether you're attending or not, you owe it to the host/hostess to inform them. When I reply, I also tell them if I'll be bringing our son along because I can't leave him behind elsewhere. I know that replying to RSVP's is still not widely practiced here in the Philippines but I do hope that you can take time to reply especially if you're not coming so they can assign your seat to others.

Do you have more invitation etiquettes to share? I'm excited to read your thought about this!

Did you like my post? CLICK THIS to have my posts delivered straight to your email inbox.