Engagement Party Guest List

[caribqueen]

Date: 5/7/2010 9:39:37 PM
Author: hawaiianorangetree
I never had an E party so i can''t speak from personal experience, only what i have read about in Australian bridal mags.
Lots of people tend to have big engagement parties and invite everyone, then at the party they announce that the wedding will be a fairly small event, to let everyone know in advance kind of thing.

This would probably be seen as absolutely tacky to the US girls on this board but i can see the practical side of it and i would just put it down to another thing that some Aussies do differently.

LS, I can see why you''re asking and I do think that it is possible to invite people to an engagement party without also inviting them to the wedding. And I think certain circumstances can dictate that.

Here''s my example:
When FI and I became engaged we were living 2,000 miles away on the West Coast from both of our families on the East Coast, where we''re also getting married. The only people we knew locally were co-workers and just a couple friends we''d made outside of our jobs while living in that area. One of our friends and her husband proposed throwing us an engagement party and their reasoning was that it would be a way to celebrate with co-workers and other local friends who would not be invited to the wedding or even make the trip if they were. Also because we were so far from family, she thought it might be nice to be able to celebrate our future in some way even if we could not be with our families. It was a very nice gesture.

If your situation is in anyway similar, then I''d say you have a little wiggle room with who you invite. FI and I never okay''d the engagement party because we got so busy and then ended up moving back to the East Coast. But if we did follow through, we might''ve just done it as a regular party and asked our hosts to tell guests NO GIFTS. And honestly, our friends and co-workers there knew that we simply could not invite them to our wedding so there would not have been any issues later on.

 

[hawaiianorangetree]

Date: 5/6/2010 1:41:18 PM
Author:legallyspoiled

My mother is planning on throwing an engagement party for us. Originally, she wanted us to have two receptions. One in Houston and one in D.C. I told her that would be way too expensive and immediately vetoed the idea.

Except, I have to get a guestlist to her. Here is my dilemma. I don''t know who to invite. The whole point of the party is to invite family and friends who aren''t likely to attend the wedding because it is so far away. But you aren''t supposed to invite someone to an engagement party that you won''t invite to the wedding. There are people that I want to invite to the engagement party who probably wouldn''t be on my A-list for the wedding. Some of these people, I am pretty sure won''t attend the wedding anyway. But you never know! It is difficult to put into words. I have people on my engagement party guest list who will get an invitation and will come. Others on the list will come and won''t be on the list. Or do I just send everyone I invite to the engagement party an invitation to the wedding and pray they don''t come?

Why don''t you just invite the people who wont be invited to the wedding because of the various reasons you have already explained? So you have the ''engagement party'' in D.C. for the people in D.C. and then you have the wedding in Houston for the people in Houston (or vice versa). Naturally the bridal party and immediately family would overlap for these two events, but each city gets their own celebration.

I understand how being invited to an e party but then not to the wedding would be offensive to some people, but i feel that in this particular circumstance that inviting everyone to the e party and then also to the wedding would defeat the purpose of the e party in the first place. (Legals mum wanting to have 2 receptions in different states illustrates the point that not everyone could have been invited the one wedding event anyway).

I would have the two parties with different guest lists, but maybe not call one an engagement party, to stop people being offended for not being invited to the main event.