You Can't Always Get What You Want...

A while ago, I was reading the ever-sensible and down-to-earth A Practical Wedding blog and came across a post about choices.  In essence, the entry argued that everything regarding the wedding was a choice, not a necessity.  You don't need to have (insert any number of wedding-related items here,) but most of us want them and therefore have to choose what to incorporate. Great advice, if I ever heard it, and I've kept it in my head since.

I've been thinking about this advice with the recent arrival and departure of my invitations. I'll admit, my invitations were not in any way a DIY project nor were they particularly cost-effective (I got a great deal on them but they were well over the usual cost per invite of a hand-made one.) I love them to death but the cost left little room for extras.

Which is why I chose to not have calligraphy addresses or even faux-lligraphy addresses.  Nope, instead I grabbed a pretty, light blue Gel ink sparkly pen and wrote everything out by hand, adding a few flourishes here and there but nothing super-intense. Although there was a big part of me that was convinced that the outside of the envelopes had to be as beautiful as the insides, the budget has been steadily increasing as the wedding approaches and we all know the feeling of panic that tends to accompany that phenomenon.

Ultimately, when it came down to hard numbers, as much as I wanted to have beautiful hand-calligraphied envelopes, it just did not make sense to spend the extra money and therefore I made the decision not to do it.
So far, I think the decision was the best one for us, although there is a part of me that yearns a bit wistfully for lovely, calligraphied addresses.

I guess the point of this post is to remember that every wedding decision is a choice, not a necessity and there is always an alternative, although it may not be as attractive.  For the most part, I'm very happy with the choices I've made regarding the wedding, but some of them have required serious thought and some late-night tossing and turning.

What choices have you made during wedding planning that you really had to think long and hard about?