! Pretentious to send a formal response to a formal invitation? Rude? How ridiculous!
“Oh, look! A card from Podkayne. Wonder if it’s a wedding card with a gift certificate for Walm—huh? What’s this? ’ . . . accept with pleasure the invitation of . . . Saturday the eight of . . .’ What on earth? Is this their RSVP? Why didn’t she usethe RSVP card we sent with the invites? Damnit, this won’t fit in a neat stack with the rest of the RSVP cards. What the hell happened? Did she lose it? Why did she write it out all fancy? Wait a minute . . . was she trying to make some kind of a point? Ooooh, this is just like Podkayne! Moved out East to go to some fancy-pants grad school, and now she’s better than the rest of us? She has to point out that she’s different and special with her snotty ‘accepts with pleasure’ and her hoity-toity stationery, because she’s too sophisticated to just fill out her damn name on the RSVP card and mailing in the evelope I sent! Cripes, I can’t believe I wasted a stamp on her!.”
This is the first wedding invitation I have received in my life that didn’t come with an RSVP card. No, wait, I take that back—one of them said to RSVP by e-mail because it was a somewhat hurried affair. I never even heard that anyone might consider RSVP cards gauche until I stumbled across it in Miss Manners a few years ago. A formal handwritten response is not the norm amongst my family and friends, and I do believe if I were to RSVP on my own stationery (especially using the formal wording) when a card was provided, it would at the very least puzzle the recipient, or at worst put them off.
Honestly, in this case, it may be that the bride’s family isn’t from the hubby’s hometown and is a stickler for etiquette, but I think it’s much more likely that the RSVP card was accidentally omitted—or maybe his side of the family is still pissed at me because we had a small wedding and didn’t invite his eight hundred aunts, uncles, cousins and cousin’s kids and they left it out as some kind of a slight. But, hey, either I’ll impress her family because I’m the only one from His Side who sent a proper RSVP (I can guarantee that nobody else in the hubby’s family will), or they’ll just be totally weirded out. Since at most I’ll bump into his cousins at Christmas dinner some year, I don’t much one way or the other.
The most important thing is I got to shop for fancy stationery! Squeee!
To make a point, since you are declining the invitation, I would most definitely not center the RSVP.
Subtlety is everything, you know. There is no need to enumerate your reasons for not attending. The fact that you declined to take the time to center your response will speak volumes, I’m sure.
If it were me, I’d just write it out on yellow legal paper with a ball-point pen.
i always reply on house paper. even if there are rsvp cards.
for the centering thing, miss manners shows (pg455 guide to excruciatingly correct behaivour) using 3 to 4 word per line in the middle of h.p…