Wedding Invitations

Mailing Wedding Invitations

Mailing the wedding invitations could be tricky sometimes, especially when you find yourself under time pressure or have no idea how to address them.

In this era of technological development, where the Internet is the supreme ruler, you can always try to e-mail them to your guests. Then again this is a poor advice so don’t try this method: is distasteful and a so not very special way of describing how your wedding would be like.

The mailing of the wedding invitation has its important and long history.

In the dark era of middle age, wedding invitations were mostly verbalized, being issued out loud, sometimes by a town crier, so that people who didn’t know how to read, could participate at the wedding. The ones who heard the news about a wedding being held

would participate as the guests of the ceremony.

Written invitations were left in the care of educated people, since only the chosen few had the opportunity to learn how to write: the nobility or monks; the written invitations were sealed with wax, adding to them the symbol of the family of the bride and groom, known as the coat of arms or family crest, and only after that the invitations were delivered through a courier.

Since there were no “addresses” to mail them to, people would often use directional signs to guide the courier and reach the correct destination: these could’ve been a bridge, an inn, a forest, a known road, etc.

Since the postal system was not invented at the time, the messengers used horses in between towns to deliver the wedding invitation. They weren’t that much reliable and wedding invitations would usually get dirty or ripped even before they reached destination, so the practice of the double envelope became popular.

When the invitation reached its destination, it was passed directly into the hands of a housemaid or butler who made sure to remove the outer envelope and pass the invitation in the inner envelope to the house master or mistress.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the printing press was used to write the wedding invitations, but sometimes information about a wedding ceremony could be found in a newspaper as local information. This method of announcing a wedding was used mostly by those who didn’t have the money for wedding invitations.

But those who opted for the engraving of wedding invitations would use a small piece of tissue to prevent the smudging of the invitation card. This custom is still being used today.

The wedding invitations usually come from the bride’s home and should be mailed with six to eight weeks in advance. If some guests are out of town consider in sending a “save the date” card with some hotel suggestions and always add a RSVP date of minimum 2 weeks to your wedding invitations, to make the proper arrangements for the upcoming ceremony.

Don’t forget to take a good look at each invitation card and verify the information written on it. Only after that you could put them in envelops and send them to your guests.