Wedding Announcements to Announce Your Wedding to Family and Friends By Sarah Porter

Printed Wedding announcements are one of the parts of most stationery packages for brides and grooms, along with wedding invitations and wedding thank you cards. However, many couples aren't really sure what they should be doing once they have them printed and ready to mail. They have lots of questions, including who receives them, when they hit the mailbox and what they should say in the first place. Here are some suggestions and helpful hints.

Things You Should Know about Wedding Announcement Etiquette

Although marriage announcements are something you would normally purchase in advance, usually around the same time you would order your invitations they aren't something you would mail at the same time. Instead, they should be put in the mail the day of or the day after your actual wedding. The reason should be pretty obvious: you wouldn't want to get those wedding announcement cards in the mail only to have something happen to delay the event.

Before you reach that point, you'll need to figure out how many photo marriage announcements to order. That's probably one of the easier decisions. When you're making your original list of who to invite, you probably remember there being some people who weren't included on the list but who were given consideration. These are all people who should receive reception announcements. Basically, you should send the wedding reception announcement to anyone who is not invited to your wedding but who you might have invited if you'd had more room or more budget available.

When it comes to wording wedding reception announcements, it should be very similar to what you have written on your marriage and reception invitations. You want to include the couple's name, the date and location of the ceremony, and the name of the couple's parents. Do not send information about gift registries with your unique weddings announcements. Some recipients will send gifts but they are not required to do so. Make sure to plan ahead and purchase additional thank you cards that you can send to them.

Other Important Points about Wedding Announcements

Wedding announcement are a nice way of letting people know about your marriage but they are even more essential if you are not having a large wedding or if you are having a destination wedding with only a few people attending. You want to let everyone in your family know about your wedding even if they can't actually come to the event.

If you don't want to worry about sending the marriage announcements on your wedding day or on the first day of your honeymoon, make sure you have them all ready to go and turn them over to a trusted member of the wedding party, possibly the bride of the mother or the maid of honor. It would be nice to purchase special stamps for the announcements just like you might use for your invitations. The post office sells these new "Love" stamps every year that are perfect for personalized wedding announcements.

About the Author: Sarah Porter is author of several articles including Unique Wedding Announcements, Custom Wedding Invitations, Printed Wedding Announcements, Wedding Invitations Cards and many more on express-invitations