"Come to Abbie's BBBQ. The extra B is for BYOBB."
Today marked the culmination, the conclusion, the climax, if you will, of the invitation phase for Abbie’s birthday party. We spent the afternoon walking (I walked, she rode) from door-to-door in our complex handing out invitations to our neighbors and Ellie’s co-workers. I rang lots of doorbells and handed out lots of invitations, kind of like door-to-door evangelicals, except that instead of offering a guarantee for eternal salvation*, we were offering cake and ice cream in about a week and a half. Believe it or not, the process of creating the invitations was so involved that I would like to share the process here, and in excruciating detail if necessary.
First we needed paper. We had already decided that we are too cheap to buy the glossy, archival-quality, gold-plated, pre-made invitations you find in stores, but we thought that printing invitations of plain white paper would look wrong and send the wrong message, namely “we’re cheap.” I found a nifty middle ground by buying that plain paper with the fancy pre-printed border. It sends an acceptable message of “we’re not cheap, we’re just the eccentric type who enjoys doing things ourselves.” At first I thought I would buy the kit that comes with envelopes and is actually intended to be used as invitations, but it turns out that those kits use paper that comes from the treacherous paper mines of Coatzacoalcos, and is therefore prohibitively expensive. Then I would thought I would stick to the party’s theme and buy paper with a Sesame Street border, but I couldn’t find any, so evidently plain paper with a pre-printed border is the one product Sesame Street has yet to license characters onto. I ended up buying paper with balloons and ribbons on the border, paper that sends the message “these would be choking hazards if our child were any younger.”
With paper in hand, the next step was to find ridiculously high-quality Sesame Street based picture on the Internet that would look fairly good printed on paper. After filtering out all of the porn sites, I found one.**
Now I could begin writing the invitation. I started with:
“We invite your family to join our family as we celebrate Abbie’s 1st birthday.”
The wife and I immediately ran into disagreement, as I wanted to say, “… celebrate the 1st birthday of Abbie” so I could end the sentence with Abbie’s name in a big fancy font. Ellie thought that sounded too formal (as if the balloon border wouldn’t negate that). Ellie won, though, so “Abbie” is big and fancy while “1st birthday” is small and homely, awkwardly dangling by itself at the end of the sentence. The next part reads:
“Monday, May 30th @ 12:30 in the park (in case of rain, we’ll move to the neighbor’s basement.”
Thanks, neighbors! Also, the joy of our complex is I can say “the park,” and everyone knows what I mean.
“Lunch and dessert will be served”
That sounds clunky, but I didn’t know how else to word it without including the whole menu. It’s not just “cake,” it’s “cake and ice cream,” and saying “lunch and cake and ice cream” is just silly.
“RSVP by Friday, May 27th.”
Ha ha! As if anyone actually RSVPs anymore.
“No gifts, please.”
This was tough to word. We didn’t want people to think they had to bring a gift because that just starts the vicious cycle of exchanging five-dollar birthday trinkets that the kid probably won’t want anyway, and since most surrounding families have more than one child, we’d lose that game. Likewise, if people genuinely want to bring a gift, who are we to discourage them? We went through several permutations. “No gifts are expected” was too jumbled. “No gift required” was too presumptuous. “No gifts, please” discouraged people who genuinely wanted to bring a gift, but screw it, I’m tired.
“BYOB.”
I swear that the invitations for Abbie’s first birthday party contained that acronym. It sends the message “I know you doctors like your alcohol, but we’re too cheap to buy it for you.”
* Offer is not actually a guarantee
** You can view it at http://www.rockpaperscissors.biz/rps-media/Elmo.jpg, but be warned, it’s ridiculously high quality.
First we needed paper. We had already decided that we are too cheap to buy the glossy, archival-quality, gold-plated, pre-made invitations you find in stores, but we thought that printing invitations of plain white paper would look wrong and send the wrong message, namely “we’re cheap.” I found a nifty middle ground by buying that plain paper with the fancy pre-printed border. It sends an acceptable message of “we’re not cheap, we’re just the eccentric type who enjoys doing things ourselves.” At first I thought I would buy the kit that comes with envelopes and is actually intended to be used as invitations, but it turns out that those kits use paper that comes from the treacherous paper mines of Coatzacoalcos, and is therefore prohibitively expensive. Then I would thought I would stick to the party’s theme and buy paper with a Sesame Street border, but I couldn’t find any, so evidently plain paper with a pre-printed border is the one product Sesame Street has yet to license characters onto. I ended up buying paper with balloons and ribbons on the border, paper that sends the message “these would be choking hazards if our child were any younger.”
With paper in hand, the next step was to find ridiculously high-quality Sesame Street based picture on the Internet that would look fairly good printed on paper. After filtering out all of the porn sites, I found one.**
Now I could begin writing the invitation. I started with:
“We invite your family to join our family as we celebrate Abbie’s 1st birthday.”
The wife and I immediately ran into disagreement, as I wanted to say, “… celebrate the 1st birthday of Abbie” so I could end the sentence with Abbie’s name in a big fancy font. Ellie thought that sounded too formal (as if the balloon border wouldn’t negate that). Ellie won, though, so “Abbie” is big and fancy while “1st birthday” is small and homely, awkwardly dangling by itself at the end of the sentence. The next part reads:
“Monday, May 30th @ 12:30 in the park (in case of rain, we’ll move to the neighbor’s basement.”
Thanks, neighbors! Also, the joy of our complex is I can say “the park,” and everyone knows what I mean.
“Lunch and dessert will be served”
That sounds clunky, but I didn’t know how else to word it without including the whole menu. It’s not just “cake,” it’s “cake and ice cream,” and saying “lunch and cake and ice cream” is just silly.
“RSVP by Friday, May 27th.”
Ha ha! As if anyone actually RSVPs anymore.
“No gifts, please.”
This was tough to word. We didn’t want people to think they had to bring a gift because that just starts the vicious cycle of exchanging five-dollar birthday trinkets that the kid probably won’t want anyway, and since most surrounding families have more than one child, we’d lose that game. Likewise, if people genuinely want to bring a gift, who are we to discourage them? We went through several permutations. “No gifts are expected” was too jumbled. “No gift required” was too presumptuous. “No gifts, please” discouraged people who genuinely wanted to bring a gift, but screw it, I’m tired.
“BYOB.”
I swear that the invitations for Abbie’s first birthday party contained that acronym. It sends the message “I know you doctors like your alcohol, but we’re too cheap to buy it for you.”
* Offer is not actually a guarantee
** You can view it at http://www.rockpaperscissors.biz/rps-media/Elmo.jpg, but be warned, it’s ridiculously high quality.
posted by Matt at
10:43 PM
1 Comments:
Holy crap dude. SW:E3 was pretty good, that may not be saying much because I thought E2 was decent too. Just thought I would let you in on the fantabulousticitism of the end of an era. You should put some time together, we could hang out and see the movie.
By
Anonymous, at 9:10 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home