So, we're getting married, best ways to irritate all our guests here please

[Madascheese]

Well DP pitched up with a very pretty bit of jewellery yesterday and proposed! How excited am I?

My grandmother cancelled her account with them, when she could no longer buy lions.

(That's true, btw)

I've posted already but forgot this-

Include toddlers in your wedding party and expect them to do something quirky. DS will be 2 and a half at a family wedding abroad next year. He's going to be the ringbearer. We narrowly escaped the scenario of trying to get him to walk down the aisle with the bride's father's beloved little pug. I told them they would end up running away together.

Resurrects the thread.......

Also with respect to a strict no kids policy make sure this includes your then-16 yo daughter. Think that the tears she cries everytime people ask about details of the wedding oblivious to the fact she is uninvited are tears of happiness for you.

( that actually happened to a friend of mine from university)

Great thread :o .. and congratulations OP.

I think that no wedding reception would be complete without a performance paying tribute to the dance scenes in Darren Aronofsky's film 'Black Swan'.

Naturally, the bride is already perfectly dressed to portray the white swan, and doubtless her future MIL will be delighted to wear a black costume.

However too much is to be avoided unless a 100% gory adaptation is to be staged.

Just thought of one way to make your wedding unforgettable. After the ceremony, provide drinks all round. Which have been spiked with liquid laxative for the guests you don't like but were obliged to invite. Get caterer to mix up the spiked glasses with non-spiked glasses, having missed the point. Then institute really really prolonged photocall in enclosed space. With no loo in site.

You can title your wedding photo album Study In Brown and command a lot of money for it in the modern art world.

Can't belieeeeeeeeeve I missed this thread first time around, but here are some additions:

• make sure your step mother INSISTS that the wedding ceremony is her religion (not yours, or your Dfiance's, or either of your families') otherwise she won't attend, and then when mystified DF's family ask for explanations of various rituals/aspects of the service they're meant to perform, get huffy and refuse to answer
• step mother must also refuse to allow desserts to be served until she decides (and then when she leaves the room, serve and let the guests go to town)
• only have enough seats for the ceremony for about 1/4 of your guests, so the rest have to stand. Wearing very high and painful heels
• Bride's friends - make long and inexplicable video to "barbie girl" by aqua, with you all dressed up and making actions, but do NOT mention or show the groom. At all. Until a quick picture at the end so he knows he's included.

And another one.

On the morning of the wedding, it is hilarious of the father of the bride calls the (incredibly nervous) groom and tells him that the bride and her mother had a huge fight and the bride ran away and they have no idea where she is, does he know? Particularly if bride and her mother have a rather brittle relationship and this is highly likely. Once groom has finished having a heart attack and freaking out, tell him "ha! It's a joke. She's at the hairdresser".

I've loved this thread!! Mad, please tell us how it went really - I think you'll have held the wedding of the century by now?
My oddest wedding was a friend's catholic ceremony, where the very ancient doddery priest went on about an adultery story where the husband forgave the wife a massive affair and even brought up a child he hadn't fathered... All for catholicism! Sweet, huh?

Aww thanks, it was 3 weeks ago, I'm now masqerading at LizaTarbucksAuntie.

I put some pics on my profile of what was quite frankly the day of our dreams. we had a marvellous time and thankfully so did our guests.

littlemad was a star - as always, food was perfect and rather disappointingly no one fell out.

It was described to me as a Darling Buds of May Wedding which I've rather taken to.

We loved, loved, loved our day and I'd recommend it to anyone - except you'd have to be married to my DH and have inlaws and you're not having them as they're all blummin lovely and mine, mine mine!

OK, from recent, painful experience:

• begging (giz us cash) invitations - accompany it with a twee poem - really, PLEASE! Even better if you ask for gift cards to DIY places, when everybody knows you're lazy shites who will never lift a finger to do up your own home
• make it a cash bar, with no - REPEAT NO - complimentary drink or even nibbles - from the second the ceremony ends
• make sure you don't tell anybody in advance about the cash bar so they can, I dunno, get CASH because the 1-star hotel/venue doesn't take cards
• whilst you're busy not informing people, best you don't mention that your obsession with getting the full line-up of faked staged wonderfully spontaneous photos will take about three hours, so any of your more infirm guests (the elderly and the heavily pregnant, for instance) don't have the opportunity to take a nap in their rooms between ceremony and reception.
• spend all your money on mood lighting, and buy one bottle each of the cheapest white, red and rose per table (seriously, stuff I sometimes get from the local offie for £2.50 wen I "don't care how I get there"). DO NOT GIVE YOUR UNGRATEFUL GUESTS ANY MORE! THEY'LL ONLY MAYBE DRINK ENOUGH TO MAYBE OBLIVIATE YOUR HILARIOUSLY SEXIST CAKE TOPPER AND POEMS. And we can't have that...
• stick around until the bitter end of the disco (from a noon ceremony) - again, without warning anybody beforehand - and then complain afterwards that some people (the aforementioned elderly and heavily pregnant) left before the bride and groom did.

Congratulations, btw! And if you want a whole army of people to keep your guests in line, let us MNers know!

;P

MICROPHONES for speeches!! Why has no one said this? Surely it must be the most irritating thing ever devised, especially when passed from person to person so they can all pay tribute to the happy couple.

Repeatedly imply that you are "marrying down" - that will annoy and embarrass at least half the guests, if not all.

invite as many ex couples as you can get away with, along with new partners. Seat them together. Then do the same for any long standing feuds.

Make it clear beforehand that this is your BIG day and no one is to do anything that might impinge upon it.

Children to be invited but must remain quiet and well behaved (state this on the invitation).

Spread a rumour that you intend to give the children diluted wine to toast the happy couple and that it is your wedding, so you will not be consulting with the parents first, nor allowing exceptions.

Have a dress code.

Ask for cash contributions towards the honeymoon instead of presents.

Talk incessantly about the wedding for months beforehand. Be creative about the level of detail you can go to and the length of time you can talk about each detail.

Give relationship advice to those already married and how to get a husband to those who aren't.

Plan a wedding on an island in the middle of nowhere. Outside, in a country where the weather is iffy. Make sure that there is no mobile phone reception for miles around. Don't tell your guests that you have organised cabs for MIDNIGHT and not before. Let them find this out when they want to go back to their accommodation at 10pm and the main house (where the only land line is) is closed up and they cannot call a cab themselves. They will have dressed for you flower-garden-summer wedding so with be cold, slightly drunk, tired and miserable.

We should have known since they made jokes in the speeches about how disorganised they are, ha ha ha.

• expensive hen weekend at spa
• don't invite children
• wedding in foreign country

-miles between ceremony and reception

• two tier wedding: reception then "evening party" for class B guests

-endless photos

• something more pretentious than you can afford- what motherinferior said about the budget
• adult bridesmaids

-strapless polyester dresses on adult bridesmaids -have some daft concept or theme which has nothing to do with your real lives -poor speeches -guitars -hymns to which no-one knows the tune -promise to obey him

• Khalil Gibran/Corinthians/ anything else which everyone has heard hundreds of times

-have it on a Wednesday -bore on about how difficult it is to organise: no wedding is really difficult to organise

Congratulations. I'm sure your wedding will be lovely!

If a guest has clearly chosen to keep her maiden name when she got married make sure her name card says, "Mrs husband's first name husband's surname". That will make her day especially if she is the one you are close friends with and not her husband

Make sure this is on the printed and displayed table plan too so that all her friends can make a HUGE thing out of it, despite the fact she never really talks about it.

Make sure the invitation and thank you card (that you don't send) also use this name.

I missed this first time round too, but having been to a record 7 weddings in 2011, I can give my tips:

• Remember to only invite your friend, not her partner of 7 years, because 'you guys aren't married'. This is despite us finding childcare for the weekend for DD, and saying 'of course we'd love to come', and finding out only 4 weeks before the wedding, after booking train tickets, etc.
• Make it at 11am, 400 miles away, in the middle of bloody nowhere, so that you have to spend two nights at the extortionate hotel.
• Tell your guests you've sorted out hotel rooms for them, and when you ask about the price, tell them 'don't worry', and then present them with a bill, after the fact.
• Make the wedding and reception about 12 miles apart, across country lanes, and don't provide any transport, especially for those who have flown/come by train, and therefore don't have a car.
• Have a lengthy photo session, giving guests 1/2 a glass of Pimms each, and make the cash bar charge over the odds - £8 for a G&T!
• Have a hugely lengthy church service, despite not being church goers, and prime all guests not to mention the fact that you're both divorced, as the vicar won't marry divorcees in his church.
• Don't actually come to speak to any of your guests at the evening reception, so much so, that you don't notice when one of them goes up to their room for over 2 hours, and watches telly. (Yes, I'm guilty.)
• Find that you are sharing the double room (which you are in alone, but think is being paid for by the bride - see above) with someone you've only met a couple of hours before. Lovely.

All at the same wedding this summer. Can you tell I'm still bitter?

Invite everyone for 3 pm, then use every trick you can think of to stretch the actual ceremony to two hours. For example:-

1. start late and get the vicar to make your guests rehearse the hymns for twenty minutes (to make sure the singing is up to your standard).

1. Choose tedious hymns nobody has ever heard of and sing every verse.

1. Get the organist to play interminable variations on a numbingly banal theme halfway through.

1. Include long lecture on the sanctity of Christian vows, not mentioning that the bride is divorced.

Then -

Expect everyone to enjoy lots of country dancing on an empty stomach. Don't provide so much as a cup of tea or a biscuit before 7 pm. And no alcohol.

Get them all to queue for at least half an hour for buffet.

Ignore the guests, apart from your favourites. Why would you bother to talk to them?

And declare that you're not having a bridesmaid, because it's not that sort of wedding, though you only have one niece between you and she is eight years old and beautifully behaved and has her own dress

Oh no, having just read the thread I am terrified I will break some of the cardinal rules at my wedding next weekend.

I think most important is to have as little regard as possible for your guests' finances. Therefore make it clear that you expect the following:

1. Make it clear you expect an engagement gift as well as a wedding gift.
2. Plan ridiculously expensive hen / stag do's, preferably lasting several days in a foreign country, that will cost hundreds.
3. Have the wedding in a remote location at least several hours travelling time away, necessitating that they stay in a hotel for the night. Even better get married abroad, again necessitating that people pay for travel, as well as at least a couple of days hotel accommodation and expenses.
4. Have nothing below £40-50 on the gift list.

If any guest ends up having to pay out less than £4-500 in total for your 'special day' then you've failed. If any guest makes it clear that they can't attend either the hen, stag or wedding because of cost, be deeply offended.

Congratulations

Personally I favour the slightly suble approach ... choose the most loved-up couples on your invitation list, then misspell the names of the partners you're least familiar with; better still, substitute their name for that of an ex (Bitter experience speaking)

When choosing a knee length starched skirt for your bridesmaids, on no account check if they can actually sit down in it. Far better on the day for the poor girl to flash her knickers to the registrar when she takes her front row seat. At least I'm glad she was wearing knickers, but I had to be v careful only to look sideways from the register throughout the ceremony.

Ensure that in all the kerfuffle of organisation (including the bride arriving 2 days before the wedding to decorate the venue herself including Jo Malone candles in the loos) that the bride omits to mention to herr mate that she is doing a reading at the wedding.

Ensure said mate finds out when she sits in the pew and another guest says "Bottom I didn't realise you were doing a reading".

Good job I'm not nervous about public speaking (but I didn't pay much attention to the ceremony up to the point of the reading as I was frantically making sure I knew how to pronounce all the words!)

I went to a wedding where the manipulative old cow mother of the bride behaved appallingly.

First of all, when she found out that the wedding would not take place in church (couple were atheist, she was religious) she was absolutely foul to them and wrote them a very nasty letter. In the end, the couple agreed to have a blessing in church after the wedding.

The MOB sat, with a face like a slapped arse, during the ceremony and then, afterwards, proceeded to tell the bride that she looked awful in her dress (which was beautiful) and that she looked stupid when she walked into the church.

As the poor bride and groom left to go on honeymoon, the MOB shouted out "Hope it rains!". Bitch.

Oh, very late to the party here, but from painful experience...

1. Have a really annoying 'videographer' who blocks out the ceremony for the congregation and films the whole thing, so those who have actually travelled to attend the wedding in person can't see a thing.

2. Provide about six chairs at the ceremony, so nobody has a clue who should be giving up seats for whom.

3. No food. At all. Or a very, very limited 'buffet' that has been sitting in the sun for hours and gives everyone food poisoning.

4. Enclose a poem with the wedding invitations asking for cash - including the rhyme of 'we're not being funny' and 'we're asking for money' is obligatory here -and 'suggest' a minimum 'donation' per attendee of at least 200.

5. Invite all and sundry to the wedding evening - everyone you've ever seen, in fact - and stand blocking the door holding a 'wishing well' as they arrive. Bark at them that a 'minimum donation' of 20 is expected if they want to come in.

6. Either don't invite any children and then invite some, or make the party so child-friendly that the buffet consists of babybels, jelly and ice cream, speeches are replaced by a children's entertainer doing Mr Tumble impersonations and other guests completely miss the childrens' TV references that the kids are laughing so uproariously at. Sternly ban all grown-ups from the bouncy castle you've hired, despite having nothing else for the adults to do but mill around listening to kiddie-friendly party-tunes that the children can't hear because they're on the bouncy castle.

How I wish I hadn't experienced these. (Number 5 got divorced a month after the wedding)

Decide not to have any bridesmaids, particularly if you've got a seven year old niece who is perfect flower-girl material. (I am the niece still never been a bridesmaid and looking unlikely I ever will be now I'm in my mid-30s )

Urgh I've just resurrected a stupidly old thread