update at bottom:
Okay, ladies and gents, wrestling with a problem, wanted to get your take:
It's my understanding that the rehearsal dinner is 'generally' hosted by the groom's parents and can be for the wedding party, any of their dates, parents and out of town guests. I heard that it was done this way because traditionally, the wedding was in the bride's hometown and the groom's parents wanted to have something for everyone.
A few exciting facts about our wedding:
1) It's happening in neither of our home towns, though because I grew up in westchester and have some family on the island, i probably have 'home court advantage' for lack of a better. but i think it's fair to say that at least half of our 230 person guest list is from out of town. Pretty much all of my fw's family is coming in from out of town.
2) Because several members of our bridal party won't travel until late saturday night, there's actually not going to be any rehearsing saturday night at this dinner.
3) Both sets of parents have been very generous in helping us cover the costs of everything, with fw's parents paying more, but with my folks giving us a decent sized chunk of change for us to use for 'whatever we want'. We're still on a budget and trying to stick to it, but suffice to say their support is helping us do this at all.
We had been using the money from my folks to cover, among other things, flowers, and we were going to pay for the rehearsal dinner ourselves. FMIL said something really nice, offering to pay for the flowers so we could use some of the money my folks have given us to pay for the rehearsal dinner and that way, my parents could host it. As one of taking one thing off of our plate, FW suggested we ask my mom if she's willing to do legwork on finding a place (my mom's pretty good at coordinating gatherings like this, so I think it's no problem). My mom is happy to do it, but I had the following exchange with her:
Me: so who would you invite to the rehearsal dinner?
Mom: no one. us, and your sister and her date.
Me: huh?
Mom: isn't the rehearsal dinner for the bridal party?
Me: yeah, but we want to do it for OOTers as well. So who should we invite?
Mom: But (stealthgroom), if you do that, your rehearsal dinner is going to be 100 people. Plus it could end up being contentious, inviting some cousins and not others. I'm happy to do it, but you should tell me how many people to plan for.
Mom then suggested to me that her understanding of the rehearsal dinner is that it's for the bridal party, their dates, the parents, and that's basically it, and to do something good for the oot guests you host a brunch for them the next day.
She wasn't being pushy about it, she was just giving her ideas. Now I'm a little worried about how to deal with all this. Any suggestions? How can we make the rehearsal dinner NOT a second wedding and be good to ourselves and our guests? Thoughts? Ideas?
--the stealth groom
(because i want a bomb *** party too, dammit!)
UPDATE:
So, I talked with FW tonight. She really wants tohave a dinner for all of her out of town family. If we're just talking about out of town family and the bridal party, we're talking 90 people. So I tell my mom this, and she says, 'I'm going to tell you one thing. If you're inviting out of town family and not inviting their close relatives that are here, you're going to create bad feelings from the people that aren't invited. How could you invite these cousins and not invite their brother who lives in Queens?' Ugh!!! ***?!
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