You’ve spent hours pouring over the guest list and you know exactly how many people are expected to come to your wedding reception. However, what you didn’t count on was the presence of a few wedding crashers or ‘strangers’ who you don’t know and who weren’t invited in the first place! So how do you deal with wedding crashers of all sorts? Possibly nothing could be more irritating than to find that unfamiliar people have neatly ‘crashed’ your party and are enjoying their fifth drink and appetizers entirely at your expense.
What if we told you that this is a situation that can be dealt with smoothly? In our two part article, we give you an idea into the kind of ‘stranger’ appearances you can expect and tell you how to deal with them as a gracious host:
Image courtesy The Team Photographers
Wedding Crashers: Actual Strangers
How: This scenario is most likely to happen if you are having your wedding reception at a public place for example like at a park or even at a restaurant. To be honest, spotting a stranger is easy when the guest list is a small one, but sometimes it’s very hard to differentiate between a stranger and a relative you haven’t been in touch with for years, when there’s a bigger crowd. Besides, it doesn’t take much for an actual wedding crasher to blend in effortlessly with the real guests.
What to Do: Asking a friend or relative to keep an eye open for unfamiliar faces is a great way to spot wedding crashers. Genuine guests will mingle around but uninvited ones will be keener to grab some food, guzzle a few drinks and then leave. It is also likely that they will not be appropriately dressed for the occasion either. One of the best ways to keep track of which guests have come, is to meet the guests as they are eating or socialising. If you spot an unknown face, ask your partner and immediate family members if they know who the person is. If nobody knows who the guest is, then it is best to ask your wedding planner or the manager of the venue, to escort the uninvited wedding crasher outside the venue and to ask them to leave. There is no need to create a scene when an uninvited guest turns up as it could shift the focus of the party altogether.
Image courtesy Confetti Films
Wedding Crashers: Wedding Vendors
How: Whether you should invite your wedding vendors or not depends entirely on you but what matters is that they act professionally while they are supposed to be ‘working’ at your party. For example, it would not be considered professional if the wedding photographer decided that it was fine to go ahead and have a glass of wine just after the ceremony came to an end and just before the reception started. In Indian weddings, it is taken as a given that invited vendors will have their meal after all the guests are finished with theirs.
What to Do: So you spotted one of the waiters casually picking up a hot samosa and then enjoying it by himself, when he should have been serving guests instead. In such a scenario, it is ideal to ask a cousin or your bridesmaid to speak to the catering manager about this incident. Do not try to speak to him yourself because you won’t have the time for that. Another preventive action you can take so that your photographer, the lighting boys and any other vendor who is present behaves himself is by having an actual contract drawn up before hiring any of their services on your wedding or asking a family member to talk to them about happy hours and meals before the ceremony begins. This also acts like a pre-given warning and automatically puts all vendors on their best behaviour.
In our next article, we look at two more types of wedding crashers who you can expect at your wedding and how to deal with them effectively sans the drama.
