I care about all of the children in my family, and I still think holding an impromptu dance recital for a 3 year old at a wedding reception would be cringe inducing.
Except for the 50% of the guests from the bride’s side, who may never have even heard of these children’s existence, and are wondering why the hell the groom’s cousin’s kids are upstaging the bride at her own wedding.
No kidding. What a cringe worthy idea.
Assuming there’s no open bar at the dance recital… I’d opt for the wedding.
If I were grandma, it would depend on how close I was to the nephew, quite honestly. And whether I could skip the ceremony for the dance recital, and go to the reception.
My mother has nieces and nephews whose wedding she would gladly skip (I haven’t even been INVITED to all of my cousins weddings - I think she’s been invited, but I know she hasn’t attended them all) with an excuse. And there are cousins I have that get married with all the pomp and ceremony in the world - at which their aunt and uncle could quietly slip in during the reception with their absence never noted. And ones that invite their relations out of “duty” - but breathe a sigh of relief with RSVPs in the negative because its either less expense or more friends that can be invited (my sister is currently in this state - getting married for the second time in her late 30s and, honestly, a little disappointed to find out that relatives she hasn’t SEEN in five years are going to bother to go to her wedding.)
But she also has nieces and nephews that really truly value HER (and my dad) and would value their presence at their wedding. For those, a three year olds dance recital is not at all important.
I have three nephews - one is 19 and I haven’t seen him since I was six or eight years old. When I get an invite to his wedding, I’m sending a nice card - maybe some cash. If my other engagement is “its the release date whatever Johnny Depp is in” - that’s a good enough excuse. The other two are five and six years old.
Attendance at the recital(s) is so mandatory that it’s now,instead, likely to be forbidden? 
Quoth Mr. Spock: “Does not compute.”
She’s 3 years old? Was “20 years” a typo? Did you intend to write “3 days”?
But who am I to laugh? Some of us have families so dysfunctional as to make yours seem comparatively like Ozzie and Harriet.
The wedding. The 3 year old will not remember it anyways but the nephew is only getting married once…hopefully. There will be other dance recitals.
I want to know more of the context of your sister’s comment. On it’s face, of course her reaction sounds over the top. But if your mother has a history of sticking it to your sister or making it clear that sister’s concerns or needs are never important (or that other people’s are always MORE important than hers), well I could see where she’d blow her stack if this was part of a pattern. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of crossing paths with passive aggressive narcissists and they seem to revel in riling people up and provoking reactions. Especially if they get to make the other person look nuts.
It’s like the time my parents got in a huge fight over how to refill an ice cube tray and the cops ended up being called because my mother was screaming and smashing plates on the floor. It wasn’t about the ice cube trays. It was about his pattern of demeaning and patronizing her and the message that she was too stupid to even know how to refill and ice cube tray. The context was years of verbal abuse and put-downs finally resulting in her just losing it. And then of course he still gets to be right. “Look at how crazy she is. Smashing plates over ice cube trays.”
I’m not saying this is necessarily the case with your sister, but I always want to know what’s going on behind the scenes in situations like this. Maybe she is being ridiculous, but maybe there’s also a reason why her reaction is so strong?
I agree with kayaker– send her some roses. Though in addition to that, I’d probably send her one of those little cookie baskets that looks like a bouquet of flowers (waiting for her back at home)- after all, even if a little girl is OH SO HAPPY about roses (and she will be!), kids like cookies :D.
Your sister’s the worst, OP.
Wedding. The kid’s three, she’s not going to remember who is or isn’t at her dance recital years down the road.
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Wow, I’m in stunned by these responses. Upstaging the bride? Because a child does a 5 minute dance? Cringeworthy? Children dancing at a wedding? Seriously? :rolleyes:
I would be honored if someone wanted to dance or sing at my wedding. And with little kids, they don’t even need talent, ‘cause they’re just utterly cute.
And presumably the “other 50%” are there to celebrate the combining of the two families, and to get to know one another. Not to get drunk and look for excuses to bow out if a moments polite attention is required. :dubious:
I think there’s two questions here, the first is “Which event would you go to?” and the second is “Your mother is missing your child’s recital to go to a wedding, what do you do about?” For the first one I think most sane people would go to the wedding although sure, there are situations with it’s distant/estranged family where some people would pick the recital. But that’s not the case here, grandma already made up her mind – she wants to go to the wedding. Maybe she made that decision out of love for the nephew or out of social obligation or just because she wants to enjoy the open bar. Either way all the daughter can really do is say “Ok, Sally will miss you.” (well, the other option is take Sally and go to the wedding).
Yes, seriously. It’s a wedding, not a talent show. If people want to dance, they can go on the dance floor and dance to whatever the DJ is playing, like people normally do at weddings.
Carol the Impaler, you are correct that there is a lot of back history here, but it’s not as simple as, “My sister has been put upon for years and this is just one more example.” I think my sister likely perceives this to be the case, but speaking as an objective observer here, it’s not really true. My mom also perceives my sister to have slighted her in a lot of ways that aren’t really true, either. It’s a whole big clusterfuck. If both of them stepped outside their boxes and realized that the other person actually does care about them and isn’t just trying to score points constantly, things would go a lot better for everybody, but I’m not holding my breath.
Forget wedding, I’d skip a three year old’s dance recital for an ice cold tall boy and half a pack of matches to play with.
Kids spontaneously dancing at a wedding? Excruciatingly cute. Kid’s parent interrupting the festivities, cuing up the “Baby Elephant March” and coaching her three year old through some badly choreographed and executed dance moves? Excruciating.
A wedding isn’t a talent show. Would you have your kid recite the poem she memorized for second grade language arts class too?
Oh, well, in that case I definitely vote for the wedding! 
The wedding, of course. The 3 year old child will have forgotten within about five minutes that you didn’t attend the dance recital. And there will be heaps of other recitals anyway.
Normally I would also say wedding. But (not to feed into the sister’s batshittitude) a compromise might be to attend the recital and make a later appearance at the reception.
I’ll tell a similar story. Mr. S and I had a tiny, fairly impromptu wedding that included only our closest friends and family. For our 20th anniversary we decided to throw the big party for all of our family and friends that we didn’t throw the first time. We rented the town hall and got food mostly catered from the grocery store, and a family friend made us a nice cake.
Guess what date two of my cousins’ kids chose for their joint high school graduation party?
This was midsummer, so neither event included an actual ceremony. The invitations crossed in the mail, so I was opening theirs the same day they were opening mine. Oops.
Of course my three cousins (all sisters) and their father (my uncle, Mom’s brother) were going to go to the party for their children/niece/nephew/grandchildren (2 hours away). So we lost out on that whole branch of the family.
I was privately burned a little because I’ve been attending parties for these cousins’ kids for 20-some years. We don’t have kids, so there’s been no reciprocity. We didn’t have the big wedding. So the ONE BIG EVENT we will probably throw in our lifetime to celebrate something for ourselves, and NONE of them came. They all live near each other and do stuff together all the time. But they couldn’t even send one or two people to congratulate us on one day. (This was NOT about gifts, just attendance and well wishes.)
BUT . . . I had my private snit and whined to a few close friends (and fully acknowledged that I was being whiny). And then I got over it. I didn’t hold it over anyone’s heads or gripe to anyone directly involved. Why? Because I’m not a complete bitch.
People keep claiming the kid won’t notice, care, or remember, but my niece certainly noticed and cared that I couldn’t come to her first recital. When she asked me if I could come to the second one, when she was 4, she looked up at me with her huge brown eyes and added, “You didn’t come last year.” Not that I would necessarily skip the wedding for the recital, but I feel bad for the kid, especially since Granny is going to her sister’s dance recital but not hers.
I think stopping the music, announcing that 2 small kids are going to do their dance recital, watching the two of them be totally self conscious and refuse to dance because they’re all alone and not with all their classmates, would be disruptive. And the bride’s side would quickly find out that the groom’s insane cousin demanded that her daughters be allowed to dance since he had the audacity to have his wedding on the same day as their recital. Even though that’s not entirely the truth, that’s how the story would look to them.