First of all a big ?Happy New Year? to everybody, and second of all a huge congratulations to anyone who got engaged over the festive season!  If you are newly engaged and in the early stages of planning your wedding, then one of the first tasks you’ll be tackling is deciding who you will (and won’t) be inviting to the wedding.
I’ll start off by letting you know that I feel your pain.  I’m from an absolutely huge family, with a mix of Italian and Lebanese Grandparents, and I think if I tally it up I probably have about fifty cousins.  Think ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ and you’re getting close (my Mother thinks Piriton cures literally every illness).  And when I say I have about fifty cousins, I don’t mean distant cousins that I don’t know very well; I actually mean the kind I know well and hug and kiss and actually really like, and they all have families of their own.   So if it ever came to a point of creating my wedding guests list (I live in hope), I think I’d probably have to run off to Vegas before I got past the first page. Tempting as making a run for it might be, if you do want to celebrate the big day with your nearest and dearest, there’s going to be a process involved to figure out who makes the list and who doesn’t.  As tough as that can be, the good news is that this is 2018, and the strict rules of guest list etiquette don’t apply in quite the same way they once did.  ...