Kathleen & Matt Have Sent You an Evite!

Last weekend I was looking again for wedding invitations. I was half hating and half enjoying looking for the one that's just right for our wedding.

Part of me, no surprise, thinks they're a waste of money and effort. No one we care about is going to say, "well, I would've gone to their wedding, but unfortunately their invitation is ugly/cheap/neon orange, so now I'm going to decline." It's a rather pricy detail for a wedding, and it's something few people remember.

And how easy is good old Evite? It knows my past invitees, it logs the responses, it sends reminders. Plus, Evites don't kill any trees. Hopefully eventually wedding Evites will be socially acceptable, but I know I can't do that in 2009. (Somewhere my mom is horrified envisioning the e-mail in her Yahoo inbox: "Kathleen & Matt Have Sent You an Evite! Hope you can come to our wedding!")

Sadly, I have this picture embedded in my mind of a wedding invitation on the floor of my friend Norma's car with footprints on it. Norma's friend spent all this time and effort picking something out that reflects the couple, the dressiness, the theme, and then it ends up being stepped on and maybe eventually the soiled invitation finds a permanent home in a trashcan. That is the future of wedding invitations, whether we like it or not.

Now on the other hand, I am a dying breed. I still send paper mail. You know, the kind that you put a stamp on? The kind that takes a couple days to get to the recipient? I think it's almost as much fun to send mail as it is to receive it. Paper mail is elegant (well, maybe not so much when I put Winnie the Pooh stickers all over it) and thoughtful. It requires using a pen and being careful that I don't write something wrong because there's no Backspace and I haven't owned White-out since high school. I get very excited when I get a wedding invitation. Someone took the time to think of us, obtain our mailing address, write that out, stamp it, AND put in the mail. That's a lot of effort!

So, fine, we will send paper mail invitations, even if I end up stepping on it when I'm a missus and a passenger in Norma's car.