Wedding Invitation Reply Card

Our concern is about the wedding invitation reply card. My daughter is to be married in August and we’re working on the wedding invitation. I’m of the old school that reply cards with self-addressed, stamped envelopes are tacky. They always seem desperate and the expense is outrageous. Guests should be able to write a simple note accepting the invitation. However, the printer says we have to have a reply card, but do we really need to put stamps on all the reply card envelopes?

–G.T., Providence, RI

People have come to accept the fact that they have to fill out a reply card in order to attend a wedding. The practical reasons are clear.

The caterer will need a head count ten days out in order to hire the right amount of waitstaff and order enough food and beverage; having a cut-off date on the reply card will encourage guests to mail their reply in a timely fashion.

You would have numbered the reply cards by hand in small print on the back to make it easy to identify the responder. That number would correspond to the name on the invitation list.

The latest update on the wedding invitation reply card is that you do not have to include a stamp on the reply card envelope. Wedding coordinators recommend doing so because there are so many people paying bills and corresponding online who wouldn’t necessarily have stamps on hand. That could delay the feedback process.

Believe it or not, when it is a fill-in reply card some people will simply fill in their first names, as in ‘Paul and Judy,’ and if there are two Paul and Judys or even one Paul and one Judy, who didn’t include their last name, you may not be sure who has accepted.

Taking the time to apply a stamp to the reply envelope is a small courtesy to your guest for replying on time.