When I got engaged, I envisioned a confrontation with my parents over the location of my wedding. My fiancé and I live in Colorado; my parents live in Florida, and his parents live in New York. I was the first daughter of two to marry. But my fiancé and I had both lived in Colorado for over seven years, and our best friends are here. There was no question in our minds about where the wedding would be held, but I feared my parents had other ideas.
Surprisingly, they didn’t, which left me in Colorado with a wedding to plan and parents and future in-laws who wanted to be involved in the planning. A daunting task, yes, but in this day and age, not impossible.
A friend who married in 1997, before neither she nor her parents had email, told me she had “just” copied all of the bides she received and taken lots of pictures with triple prints to mail to everyone. (Which just proves that as time goes by, you remember the fun aspects of the planning more than the frustrating ones.)
Well, it’s 21st century, and while my parents have email, my future in-laws do not. So, by using a mixture of the following (and some of my friend’s advice to mail copies and pictures), I have kept all of the families involved:
- Email. My parents do have email, so when I write a wedding-related email to them, I print a copy to send to my fiancé’s parents. Vendors I’ve met with, their prices, how I felt about them, decorating ideas, ideas to save money are all fodder for these emails, and they sometimes serve as brainstorming sessions to come up with even better ideas.
- Fax. The families don’t have fax machines? If they have an email address, no problem. They can sign up for a free fax number at www.efax.com, and they’ll receive your faxes in their email inbox. For that matter, you can sign up for one yourself, to avoid having faxes sent to you at work.
- Digital camera. Don’t worry if you don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on a digital camera; I bought a $40 digital camera just to take pictures for the parents and my faraway maid of honor of dresses I was interested in, the church, and the reception site. They’re not the highest quality pictures, but the camera does what I need. With a color printer, you can print them for family members who don’t have email. And with a digital camera, you don’t have to pay for processing (eventually, my $40 investment paid itself off), and you also don’t have to wait for processing. You get immediate satisfaction!
- Samples. With many mail-order invitation catalogs, you can request a free sample. Once you and your fiancé have narrowed down your choices for an invitation, search some of the online invitation catalogs for similar (or, sometimes, identical) invitations, and request samples to be delivered to your family and your fiancé’s family, so they can weigh in on your final choices. You may discover (as I did) that someone may have very strong feelings for or against one of your favorites.
If you want to include your faraway families and friends in your wedding planning, there are easy and some free ways to do so in this day and age. And if you have email-less family, as I do, there’s still the good old U.S. Postal Service!
Surprisingly, they didn’t, which left me in Colorado with a wedding to plan and parents and future in-laws who wanted to be involved in the planning. A daunting task, yes, but in this day and age, not impossible.
A friend who married in 1997, before neither she nor her parents had email, told me she had “just” copied all of the bides she received and taken lots of pictures with triple prints to mail to everyone. (Which just proves that as time goes by, you remember the fun aspects of the planning more than the frustrating ones.)
Well, it’s 21st century, and while my parents have email, my future in-laws do not. So, by using a mixture of the following (and some of my friend’s advice to mail copies and pictures), I have kept all of the families involved:
- Email. My parents do have email, so when I write a wedding-related email to them, I print a copy to send to my fiancé’s parents. Vendors I’ve met with, their prices, how I felt about them, decorating ideas, ideas to save money are all fodder for these emails, and they sometimes serve as brainstorming sessions to come up with even better ideas.
- Fax. The families don’t have fax machines? If they have an email address, no problem. They can sign up for a free fax number at www.efax.com, and they’ll receive your faxes in their email inbox. For that matter, you can sign up for one yourself, to avoid having faxes sent to you at work.
- Digital camera. Don’t worry if you don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on a digital camera; I bought a $40 digital camera just to take pictures for the parents and my faraway maid of honor of dresses I was interested in, the church, and the reception site. They’re not the highest quality pictures, but the camera does what I need. With a color printer, you can print them for family members who don’t have email. And with a digital camera, you don’t have to pay for processing (eventually, my $40 investment paid itself off), and you also don’t have to wait for processing. You get immediate satisfaction!
- Samples. With many mail-order invitation catalogs, you can request a free sample. Once you and your fiancé have narrowed down your choices for an invitation, search some of the online invitation catalogs for similar (or, sometimes, identical) invitations, and request samples to be delivered to your family and your fiancé’s family, so they can weigh in on your final choices. You may discover (as I did) that someone may have very strong feelings for or against one of your favorites.
If you want to include your faraway families and friends in your wedding planning, there are easy and some free ways to do so in this day and age. And if you have email-less family, as I do, there’s still the good old U.S. Postal Service!
