Text from me to Emilie right after I mailed wedding invitations

As we get closer to our wedding date, people have started greeting me by asking, “How’s the wedding planning going?” My usual quippy response is, “I’ll tell you the day after it’s over!” I say that because I have been naively assuming that any WEDDING BLUNDERS I might possibly encounter, or be currently in the process of committing, would not be revealed to me until the actual wedding day itself.  I was a bit wrong.

Last week, after my little Bride spent the better part of a month painstakingly addressing invitations in her best Catholic-school-girl penmanship, I insisted on taking them home, so that I could give them a “once-over” and have the final say in Quality Control. I was not going to take any chances with these babies, as they were handmade in the UK, by tiny little English ladies. I found their company on Pinterest and ordered them post haste, (pun intended.) I don’t know if they have a little invitation factory there in Great Britain, but I rather preferred to picture them sitting around a kitchen table in their little cottage in Somewhere-upon-Somewhereshire gluing the ribbon and adhering the little embellishments.

I could not have been more pleased when I saw the finished product, squealing in delight. When the Father-of-the-Bride feasted his eyes on my little jewels, his first words were:

A. “Honey those are Divine!”
B. “Can I help you address them?”
Or
C. “Dear God, how much did those set me back?”

If you answered “C,” thank you for being a loyal reader of my blog.

The truth is, I couldn’t answer his question about how much they cost, because I paid for them in British Pounds. So, I don’t quite know, but it’s safe to say that they were a pretty pence. Which explains how relieved I was last week, when I finally handed 250 of them into the ever-so-capable hands of the United States Postal Service.

So imagine, if you will, the scene in my home the very next morning, when Jimmy walked into the house carrying an enormous  bin marked, “Property of the USPS” brimming over with my invitations…

I was sitting there working on my Wedding To-Do list (now that the invites were securely mailed out) and struggled mightily to process his words to me, “The best way to do this is just rip the proverbial Band-aid off quickly, so…here are your invitations back, it looks like they need more stamps!”

It seems the United States Postal Service took issue with the unorthodox shape (square?) of my English Envelopes. They RUDELY defaced most of them with large red rubber-stamping that screamed “ADDITIONAL POSTAGE DUE!” which necessitated the ordering of 130 additional un-American envelopes overnighted from Great Britain so we could re-address, re-afix proper postage and re-mail. That set us back a few more pence.

The following day, I received a ransom note from my local Post Office, saying that another 60 or so invites had been confiscated and were being held hostage there. I was welcome to drive over at my earliest convenience and negotiate their release, at 44 cents apiece.

As fortune would have it, things actually managed to go downhill from there, when word started trickling in that various members of the Groom’s family had received summons’ to report to their local Post Office to pay a small fine for the privilege of picking up their invitations…

It’s been almost a week since the debacle and I’ve spent almost every minute chasing down invitations, but I think we have recovered MOST of them. I was thinking about wearing a money-changer belt around my waist at the wedding so I could reimburse my Guests, but I’m concerned that between that and my Spanx, I won’t be able to breathe. Instead, I think I’ll just put out a jar full of change, with a sign instructing guests to reimburse themselves, HONOR SYSTEM style. Much classier…

Speaking of classy, I’ve decided that Mollie and Gracie’s invites will definitely be “Made in the USA.”  I’ll probably just buy them at Walmart!