A Futile Wedding Fight

Every bride in some part wants to be a frugal bride: get a deal on fabric for centerpieces, find your dress as part of someones sample sale, or be able to use your uncle as both officiant and DJ. And there are tons of books, websites, and lunatic ravings of women gone mad to tell you how to do just that.

But there is one entity in the wedding industry that no matter how much you scrimp and save you can never best. And even if they do not meet your expectations and requirements of the contract you make you cannot report them to any BBB.

I refer, of course, to the post office.

You are, according to every etiquette guide on earth, to send paper invitations through the mail, oh but that's not all. There are also those Save the Dates you've been working so hard on, and the shower invites. And you cannot forget about the thank yous for all those parties or Emily Post will stomp on your fingers with her hard riding boots.

I swear the post office must have some draconian deal with any writer about to talk about the proper way to send out invitations (or STD's, RSVP's, Reception cards, Thank You's, and any other way to contact your guests). It is required that everything have a stamp on it, even better if it has a couple. The internet is this evil thing that will suck the life out of both your wedding and marriage.

But everyone knows that stamps aren't that bad, just a little 42 cents for one of them. Oh, but that's right, you're inviting more than 10 people to your wedding. And you'd really like them to send back their RSVP's so they need stamps. Don't forget about all those thank you notes too.

So before you know it your nice simple wedding has raked in $150 for the post office without batting an eye and there isn't a single thing you can do about.

Don't do as I do

This weekend I got it in my head that I should start to put the invitations together. We're not ready to address them but I thought, hey it'd be easier if we already have everything in that first envelope (maybe that's why they encourage two).

As I was on about my third stuffing I realized that we had completely forgotten something, stamps for the RSVP's! And this was late on a saturday when all post offices would be closed. So my guy and I formulated a plan to get $20 from a bank and then go to a local retail store to buy postcard stamps.

We knew it was gonna be a bad day when the sky was pitch black at 8 AM and raining pumas and wolves. But still we left earlier than usual and I taught my guy how to use a drive up ATM (don't ask) and we discovered that it was all out of money or something. There was a major error that may have had something to do with all the rain and hair that got into it a few hours earlier.

After church (which we did make on time, I fear what they'd do to you if you're late to mass but I imagine it involves holding dictionaries for some reason) we headed to the local mall to pick up a groomsman gift that we'd had personalized the day before (and also stopped at a hobby store to get Star Munchkin) and stopped in the middle of the food court to try to get that ATM to work. (Though we could have used that money we just got to ride the carousel in the middle of the mall there was too long of a line)

Then after a few wrong turns (I hate those stupid islands) we eventually got to Shopko where we found a huge pallet with some deck chairs on it in the the way. We moved the thing out of the way and found the only option for postcards is a set of 10 and we needed 80 total stamps. So began a long trial and error of putting in B2, having the machine make its whirring noise, spit out a set as well as a horde of dollar coins, putting those back in, and starting all over again.

I'm pretty sure when it comes time to get ourselves the invitation stamps we'll definetly go to the post office, even if I suddenly decide we need them at midnight on the fourth of July.

If you haven't heard

Stamps are going up, yet again. So if you have to be sending out a crap ton of invitations (assuming you actually want people at your wedding) you might want to go out now and buy a truck load of those forever stamps.

I've heard that you can get some fancy pants stamps for your wedding (because there's no way your invitations are fancy enough). But for me, I'm just gonna go a bit more old school.

I keep having a variation on a wedding dream where for some reason we've moved everything up super early (I think this time it was july) so we didn't have time to get any of the fun stuff done. No getting all dressed up as bridezilla, no getting to make horrible mints with my best friend (and MOH), no getting made a dork by being covered in toilet paper by previously mentioned friend.

Okay, so I may not miss the last one as much.

Either I'm becoming all anxious about the wedding plans, or taking into account some of my other dreams (such as a spy team having to rescue a dog that was disguised as a pig) my brain might just be making shit up again.