MLS is right. No invitation is a “must show”, but a non-close relationship invite smacks of gift-fishing to me. It’s bad taste to invite everyone you’ve ever met to your wedding.
Not necessarily. I’ve been to a lot of weddings (I’m related to an immense amount of people), and I mostly get the invitations a month or so before the event; six weeks at the outside. Surely I wasn’t on the B list for all of them. They were considerably less formal than it sounds like this one is, so it’s possible there’s a difference there, though.
Do people really have a B list? I don’t stand on ceremony much – although I think courtesy and respect are very important – but this seems quite rude to me.
Typically people get married at weddings.
Customs and practices vary, but I think 4 - 6 weeks is just a bit of short notice.
IMHO a ‘B’ list is not rude at all. I’m not talking about a week before the wedding, but if it becomes apparent that you would otherwise pay for 10 undelivered meals, it’s no crime to fill out the guest list from a secondary list that you have on hand for “just in case.”
Yeah, it’s a different cultural thing which would take far too long to explain and be WAY too identifying. Anyway, engagements are pretty often less than 3 months long from engagement announcement to wedding, so getting an invitation six weeks ahead is pretty good. I got one last week for a wedding in mid-May. Totally normal for this cultural pocket. I was just attempting to point out that some invitations do come at that time, even for the A list. It occurs to me just now that while the wedding is next month, I don’t think we’ve been told when the invitation was issued, and so I’m making a point that is possibly totally useless. Unfortunately, it’s not the first time I’ve done so. 
Fair enough. To me, it sounds like “the people I really wanted couldn’t come, but I guess you’d be fine instead,” and I don’t think I’d ever be comfortable with that. But I understand not everybody sees it that way.
I try to pick up bridesmaids!
Regarding the timing of the invitations, we got ours at work in our mailboxes last week. That makes it almost six weeks until the event. I didn’t count how many invitations there were, but everyone on our small staff received one, excluding the GM and a few others. I didn’t take it at all as all of us being lumped into a B-list of guests. It didn’t strike me as a ploy to get gifts. I think his heart was in the right place. We get along all right at work, but we’ve never socialized outside the office, which is why I don’t know much about him.
There are 22 years between us, and I think that generally, people that far apart in age do not usually seek each other out as close friends. If it was going to happen, it would have by now, seeing how he’s worked there for several years. A chacun a son gout.
Well, I think it’s obviously rude if you tell people you have a ‘B’ list, the question is whether you pull from it quietly, and with enough notice to be subtle. Asking other guests when they got their invite isn’t really the height of tact either (not that you’ve suggested it, of course).
The closest I’ve ever come to the concept of a “B” list is “these are the people I’d hate it if they couldn’t come and those are the people I’m inviting 'cos I have to.”
There’s nothing rude with declining an invitation, what’s rude is not showing up without having said it beforehand. I’ve been invited for such reasons as “he’s bringing his whole soccer team and about half of them are couple-less, we need some single girls!” and “because I’m inviting one second-cousin that I went to school with and don’t want my other twenty-something second-cousins to feel snubbed” (I had to ask Mom who the heck this one was, she had to ask Grandma…)
On only going to the reception: I’ve been to a number of weddings where there were two invitation lists - in a small church it isn’t uncommon for only a select number to be invited to the wedding. We had a hundred people at our reception, and invited six to our wedding. But if you are invited to both you should go to both, if you accept at all. But if you haven’t accepted, don’t feel obligated to accept - and don’t feel obligated to send a gift either. You know how well you know this guy. We’ve send more than one “very nice note” back with no gift - when we get the invites from people we don’t know well that we suspect are “gift fishing.”
(Gift fishing: Inviting people who you know are fairly well off and suspect give nice gifts. Extra points if you only invite grown ups and know they have kids, if they live out of state, if they are really busy. The hope is that you won’t spring for the $50+ a plate at the reception, but they’ll mail you a $200 place setting of your china.)
On the gap between wedding and reception: When I got married the first time, the latest a Saturday wedding could be had was 11:00am. And without a full Catholic Mass (making a wedding take over an hour), we were in and out in 40 minutes. We couldn’t get the hall until 3 or 4pm or something. There is a logistics issue that sometimes forces people to put that gap in. They know it isn’t pleasant. I’ve filled it in the past with lunch, a long walk, or lying on the hotel bed reading a book.
That’s not unusual in Ireland. In fact, they often have three invitation lists - the church, the reception, and the “afters”, which means people who are invited to join the reception after dinner is over. They usually get sandwiches and sausages.
I have also seen invitations asking you to the reception but not the ceremony.
But if you are invited to both, I agree with Shodan’s dear mother that the most important one to go to is the ceremony, not the reception. If you have to pick only one to go to, choose the ceremony.
If I declined a wedding invitation, I might consider still sending a gift (in a low price range) just to be neighbourly.