Save the date wedding cards

Everybody is busy nowadays. Everybody needs to be somewhere every time. That’s why making sure your friends and relatives mark their calendars for your forthcoming wedding is very important.

What really are save the date wedding cards? Well simply put, these specialty wedding invitation cards are designed to help your friends and loved ones save the date of your upcoming wedding. Depending on the circumstances, these cards are given out around a year to as close as four months before the wedding. Most of the time though, details of the wedding are not yet final during this time so you do not have to be very specific on the information that you will convey. The important things you have to indicate are the following:

Name of the bride and groom
Date of the wedding
General location of the wedding (city and country where the wedding will take place)

These are the minimum requirements, but of course you can already be specific if the details are already set. You can perhaps indicate the exact location of the wedding, the name of the church and reception place, if they are already available.

Now the question is... do you really have to send out save the date cards? The answer will depend on a couple of things:

Date of the wedding – does the wedding date fall on a holiday or any relatively busy season?
Location of the wedding – is it out of town which will require your wedding guests to arrange for transportation to and from your wedding
Where your guests will come from – are they from abroad of from the provinces?

Generally, if your answer to any of the question above is yes, you will have to send out save the date cards. Again this will make sure your guests will mark their calendars for your wedding, and give them advance notice so that they can make arrangements on logistics, etc. Invitation cards are usually sent out about a month or so before the wedding, making it hard for your guests to make prior arrangements, thus the need for an advance notice, e.g. your save the date cards.

Now that you know if you need to send out save the date cards or not, you have to decide what will be the look and feel of your cards. The good news is there is no rule on how your cards need to be, they don’t even have to be a card! You can be as formal or as casual as you can be, notwithstanding the mood of your wedding. You can have a formal cathedral type wedding, and have a witty, ref magnet or a paper stopper, even bookmarker save the date! You can definitely bring out your creative juices and come up with a card (or not!) that exudes you and your partner’s personality! If you are book lovers you can send out bookmarker save the dates, if either of you loves drawing you can draw a caricature to use on your save the dates, or ask a friend to draw one for you. The ideas are endless; the only limit is your imagination! It will even be a fun project that you, your partner, friends and relatives can put together!