Wedding Cards

I never really realized how much went into picking out wedding cards until I had to do it myself. I didn't see any reason to think that wedding invitations would be any more difficult to pick out than birthday invitations, anniversary cards, or any other routine forms of greeting for special occasions. After all, although people ideally only have one wedding, a lot of the aspects of it are still pretty routine. You hire a band just like everyone else, you dress in a similar fashion, you have similar choices for food, and you even pick out a similar location. Some people get extravagant, consulting wedding planners to help them find exotic destinations and themes, but your majority of weddings follow some pretty well set traditions. Since that is the case, why should it be so difficult to pick out a wedding card?

In reality, wedding cards are extremely difficult to pick out. I never really thought about it before, but there are many different fonts, many different possible wordings, and even many different styles of paper that can be used. Do you want your wedding cards to look formal, or would you prefer them to have a more modern, laid-back appearance? Do you want them to be extravagant, or do you want simple wedding greeting cards? And that doesn't even get into wedding thank you cards. Should they match your wedding invitations, or should they be completely different?  Should they come with a great deal of elegant wording, or should they be blank to allow you to come up with your own personalized response to each gift giver?

To tell you the truth, it was very difficult for me to make up my mind on these issues. It isn't that I'm very picky. I have just the opposite problem. All wedding cards look more or less the same to me, so I couldn't choose which one to send. Since my wife is legally blind, she was not much of a help in the matter either. In the end, we decided to consult her mother and let her make the final decision. That way, at least someone would be extremely happy with the wedding invites, and it would make her feel appreciated as well. I have to say that the cards that she picked wouldn't have been my first choice. They were a little too formal for my tastes, and seemed stilted and insincere. Even so, they were definitely appropriate for the occasion, and it was nice to have someone making the decision for us.