I love wedding reply cards. There’s something wonderfully old-fashioned about them. You can’t call. You can’t e-mail. Heck, you can’t even verbalize that you’re attending the wedding. You must write and mail your response. The only other time in my life when I get to do this is when I’m fighting a parking ticket, and that rarely includes a choice of entrée.
My favorite variety is what I call the free response card. These are the blank reply cards, which require you to write a little note to the bride and groom, letting them know whether or not you’ll be attending. I’m sure most people find these cards incredibly annoying, but to me it’s a gold mine. This was the style my wife and I used for our wedding, and we’ve kept all the reply cards in an album because they’re hilarious – in most cases, unintentionally.
Six of our respondents wrote a note, but didn’t mention their name, requiring some handwriting analysis on our end.
Numerous people ran out of space, but rather than just flip the card over, they started writing smaller and smaller so that it would all fit in.
The biggest surprise was that about ninety-five percent of the respondents over the age of fifty all wrote that they’d “be there with bells on.” Obviously, I’m familiar with this phrase, but I had no idea of its popularity. In the 1950s, did people literally go to weddings with bells on? And how long was it until someone figured out how incredibly annoying that was?
My second favorite type of reply card is the confusing fill in the blank. I’m sure you seen it. It looks something like this:
“Mr./Mrs. _______________ will _______________ attend.”
The second blank is, of course, the doozey. If you’re not going, you write “not” in the blank. But what if you are going? Do you just leave it blank? But then I worry that they’ll think I just forgot to write something altogether. So I always awkwardly insert an adverb like “definitely” or “happily.” Of course, what I really want to do is write “probably” or “regrettably” in the blank, just to see what happens.
The final, and most common, style of reply card is the one where most of the work has been done for you. All you need to do is check some boxes:
Mr./ Mrs. _______________________
______ Accepts with pleasure
______Declines with regret
These reply cards don’t leave a lot of room for creative interpretation (unless you check both boxes). But more and more the fun for me comes from the large amount of data I’m asked to provide on these cards, which can include:
- Are you coming to the wedding?
- What are you having for dinner?
- Are you a vegetarian?
- Are you allergic to nuts?
- Are you allergic to cats?
- Why are you allergic to cats?
- Cats are really wonderful animals. What’s wrong with you?
Maybe someday reply cards will be come obsolete, out of fashion, or only for weddings involving stationary store owners. But even that happens, I have a feeling reply cards will never disappear forever. After all, what’s out of fashion one day will be completely in vogue the next. Which is why, in 2008, I’ll be wearing bells to every wedding I attend.
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