STD: Sexual disease? Or Save the Date...a disease in its own right

A wedding of this magnitude might rate an STD...but real royals wouldn't do anything that common! (Wiki Commons)

I am pleased to announce that from the following date onward―from June 15, 2011―any “save the date” notice that enters my house will be immediately immolated and its sender consigned to the column in my address book called “Hopelessly Crass Humans.”

The first time I got a “save the date” card regarding a wedding, I was appalled. It happened about six years ago, and to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t addressed to me, but to the man I was about to marry. Nonetheless, as I was now essentially the co-head of household, I was within my rights to deal with the thing as seemed best to me in the running of my household. I tossed it in the bin because it was so cheeky.  No, it was tacky. And crass. Mainly, it was presumptuous. Yes, that.

Still, I guess I should have figured such things were in the wings the first time I heard of a pre-engagement ring some years earlier. What the heck is THAT? When one becomes engaged, it means the man has asked the woman to marry him. (I am not dealing here with other combinations of humans agreeing to love, honor, cherish and set up house. It’s bad enough sorting out the excesses in traditional marriages in a single column; other permutations will have to wait until the oldest is out of the way.)

What, then, does a pre-engagement signify? That the man has told the woman that if she wears this semi-precious ring, later on he’ll probably get down on one knee and pop the question? Although popping, at that point, would seem the wrong image entirely. What ever happened to going steady? What about shacking up? I realize going steady has been gone since Ozzie & Harriet left the TV screens of America. But shacking up is still around, and indeed, as far as I can tell, most people who engage in pre-engagement and engagement are already quite fully engaged, so to speak.

So now there is the “save the date” card at some time before the bona fide wedding invitations go out, which is traditionally six weeks before the wedding. These days, when one’s family and friends often live a couple of plane rides away, perhaps six weeks is a bit short notice. But why not just send the invitations at, say, eight weeks? That “save the date” thing we received came in February, a week or so before our own wedding. We didn’t want too much fuss for ours―being older―so we booked a venue, ordered a cake, and sent out some hand-written invitations about three weeks before. Amazingly enough, two cousins made a long-distance trip anyway, although I was not expecting to see them. Not getting too wound up in all this does allow one some nice surprises.

That first ever "save the date" card, arriving in the dead of winter, was for a wedding in December, almost a full year hence. We didn't attend.

Is a "Save the Date" card appropriate for a Princess Bride?

What, though, is wrong with sending a “save the date” card if one is planning a big, extravagant, expensive wedding and the last thing one wants is surprises? Simple.

Sending a “save the date” card is assuming far too much. It is assuming that seeing Ms. Kerr wed Mr. Wang is the most important thing on one’s entire social calendar for the year.

And yes, it would be announced in the paper as the Wang-Kerr wedding, which might almost make it worthy of being the most important event on one’s yearly calendar.  As an aside, I always loved the wedding announcements Leno did on the Tonight Show. (Loved them more than bits about the Stupid Criminals who demanded money from banks by handing the teller an envelope with the criminal’s own return address on it.) Other favorite weddings include the Large-Beaver wedding, the Lovegrove-Butts wedding, the Phillips-Bragh wedding, the Small-Johnson wedding….

The sniggers engendered by surnames aside, there apparently is some etiquette surrounding the execrable cards.  On the iVillage website, a short article is devoted to this. The author contends the cards developed as a way to respect guests’ time and “make sure they can attend the wedding.”

Oh? I was of the opinion that attending a wedding or declining the invitation was purely a matter of personal choice, and not something for the person doing the inviting to worry about. This making-sure aspect seems to violate the age-old conventions involving issuing invitations and awaiting the positive replies of those who choose to attend―which is true for any event, not just weddings―and the regrets of those who cannot or will not attend.

In a world in which the least desire of the Princess Bride must be catered for, the making-sure aspect of  “save the date” cards doesn’t even come under the faux pas as enumerated in iVillage.

Advice from the iVillage sage

Here is, abbreviated, the iVillage sage advice:

One is advised not to send the “save the date” cards immediately upon the engagement due to vagaries in family relationships and pressures on wedding budgets.

One is advised not to send a card that’s off-color or seems to celebrate drunkenness and so on. One is advised to be tasteful. (Hasn’t that horse already left the gate if one is even thinking about sending a tacky, obnoxious, imperious card in the first place?)

The best part of it the STD card

One is advised to boldly inform recipients of the “card” when it isn’t a card at all but a fridge magnet, lest they inadvertently lay it down on a computer component and erase memory.  This was my favorite, actually―such total tackiness―until I read the next bit of advice: Senders are advised to give complete information about the wedding venue in the miserable s-t-d card because “Guests need to know how many days they'll need to take off of work.”

My answer to that would be “None.” Regardless. None.*

Finally, one is advised not to fill the envelope with confetti or sparklies as people get annoyed when they must vacuum after opening the mail. “A better enclosure is a sheet of vellum with a poem or something that can be kept - or tossed - with ease,” says the iVillage writer.

If the sender is clever, the recipient can display that poem on the fridge, held in place by the magnet with the smiling pre-nuptial faces of Tiffany and Scott.

Or, if the recipient has any sense, he or she can toss the whole lot in the bin, and spend any time off on something more enjoyable than toting a hundred bucks worth of Pilsner glasses wrapped in white and silver paper to an event where they’ll have to eat cold food, totter in high heels at the non-free open bar trying to kill the pain of the feet and the fête, and pretend to enjoy flapping their wings when Wedding Band Willie cranks up that all-time favorite, The Chicken Dance.

If you’d like to read the entire iVillage instruction article for sending “save the date” cards, click here.

*We did take a day off to attend my nephew’s out-of-town wedding. But his fiancée had not sent the tacky std cards…and they were both surprised when quite a few of us who lived far away chose, without coercion, to attend a lovely small lakeside wedding at an historic hotel in New York’s Finger Lakes region.