International invite Q

[Krissie]

Tonight we were discussing how to handle our invites. Fi is British and we''ll be inviting approximately 60 friends/family from the UK to our US wedding. I know in the US it is customary to provide a stamped response envelope, but what should we do about the UK guests? Fi says that it''s not common to pre-stamp a response card in the UK, but I''m not sure I believe him on this point.

I was thinking we could pre-print the UK envelopes with his parents'' address and include a UK first-class stamp so that our guests wouldn''t have to make a trip to the post office to mail internationally. He thinks that''s too much fuss and that we should just use my parents'' address in the US (which of course would mean people would have to provide their own stamp and airmail sticker).

We won''t be back in the UK before we mail the invites so we would have to rely on his parents to get the appropriate UK stamps, etc.

So what would you do?

 

[Gypsy]

I''d do two sets. I''d do whatever Pandora and the other UK members on here suggest for the UK invites, and then do the ''normal'' US thing for US invites. We are paying for return postage for all of ours, and a few are going overseas.

 

[Haven]

It isn''t proper to send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to anyone in a formal invite, it''s just something that many people do in the U.S.

It sounds like the UK still knows how to properly respond to a formal invitation, so I''d go with your FI on this one and leave out the response cards to the UK guests.

 

[Pandora II]

I would possibly do response cards for both sets. They are becoming more common over here but is not regarded as strictly 'correct'- you are also American, so it would be considered appropriate that you would use american customs.

Or, you could pop a card in with the postal address and an email address. The older generation will know to write - younger ones will prefer email or will write.

In the UK you always put:

RSVP
18, Any Street
Some Town
Big City
DF2 5KS

(last one is the postcode - same as your zipcode

)

This goes on the bottom left hand corner of the invitation. The invitations are sent by the bride's parents and you reply to the bride's mother. I don't know if you put the RSVP bit on the invitations in the US?

I am not using reply cards - those who don't know/are too lazy to write to my mother can either tick the box on the website or telephone.

Sadly etiquette is no longer taught over here - my parents were sticklers for it, but FI hasn't a clue. His father's family came over from Germany during the war, so I've often wondered if they just don't really know about UK traditions. He thinks I'm a bit nuts for being so 'proper' about everything.

 

[aprilcait]

We didn''t include a stamp on our self-addressed response envelopes and I have to say I''m glad we didn''t. 1/3 of our invited guests did not reply. We''re going through the pestering stage now to find out who in that 1/3 plan to attend. It would have been a big waste of postage if we had stamped the response envelopes, especially considering we sent out a number of overseas invitations.

 

[karasue91]

We are having the same issue, except ours are going between the US and Canada. We were considering putting my MOH''s address on the US invites so we wouldn''t have to pay for the extra postage back up to Canada, but if you got an invite and the reply envelope had someone else''s address on them, would you think that was weird? Or do you think people probably wouldn''t even notice?

 

[Independent Gal]

I think in the end we invited people from 8 countries. So, where several people were invited from a particular country, we either bought some stamps when we happened to be in that country or, in one case, asked someone close to us to send us some stamps from that country for us to put on those RSVP''s. That covered four of them. The others had to fend for themselves.

Whether or not it is ''correct'' historically speaking, given that most people take EXTRA long to send something if they have to find a stamp, I think the American custom makes huge rational sense, and I say this as a non-American. This is particularly true when they will need a special stamp. They may well have their own normal 1st class stamps hanging around, but will have to make a special trip to the post office for international stamps.

So, some of our guests commented on how sweet it was to have the envelope stamped and all ready to go.

I don''t think you HAVE to do this, but if you can get your FI''s mom to post some stamps to you, it would probably be seen as very nice!