Wedding Etiquette in Argentina

[Alilou]

This post is probably most suited to the women's forum but hey... if guys want to weigh in.. go for it...

I am recently engaged and I am a bit confused about wedding etiquette in Argentina... Although our actual wedding is going to be in the US, we are having a reception here. My fiance is Argentine but he is very... (lets say) anti- protocol. So he doesn't give me much guidance. So a few things...

First..Rings? I don't quite get the ring situation here. My fiance is divorced and he was surprised to hear that I wanted rings... I don't mean a US style diamond engagement ring.. I just mean a wedding band. Is it optional? Or is it him? And I'm assuming engagement rings aren't really used here, right?

Second, when I suggested white gold, he told me he wanted something more traditional. Is white gold really that risque or is it him again?

Third, my mother wants to send engagement announcements (bilingual of course... she finds the idea fascinating) to everyone and their mother (literally) but I'm pretty worried if we send announcements to EVERYONE, they might be confused as an invite and we will have a 400 person wedding in no time at all. Is it normal to send out engagement announcements here(in the US it isn't... only Save the Dates)? I understand the desire because it is an international wedding and a lot of people are being excluded and it would be a nice way to include them but its a touchy area.

Fourth, general advice? Our wedding is 6 months a way and I already feel overwhelmed. I spend half my time worrying about what is "normal" here... which is silly I know but I don't want to offend my in-laws before I am actually part of the family.

Fifth, engagement photos... any photographer recs?

 

[katti]

Maybe you should talk with your futur mother in law about this. She will know what is the etiquette and what she expects it to be for her sons wedding...

 

[syngirl]

The rings is definitely a him thing.

White gold is becoming more common, we saw a lot of it on Libertad. However we got titanium & platinum rings when we were back in Canada, but you won't find those here easily.

I've never received an engagement announcement, but you could go talk to the people at Tarjetas Janet, they'll be able to tell you the spiel. They are bloody expensive though if you do decide to get cards done there.

I designed our cards myself, and for here it was a bit of a "revolution" because usually you have the traditional card plus and rsvp card, plus some stupid extra card that they use for check-in at the door. I could never figure out why they have that silly extra card, so I just did our invite all-in-one. We only had 65 people so not really a big deal.

If you're having a religious ceremony and a dinner, you can send cards that just invite people to the religious ceremony and then a separate card that invites people to the reception. Some people also will just invite people to come dancing after, which I find kind of gauche -- it's kind of backward "we want to include you but not really, so just show up at 2am so we don't have to feed you".

Fourth -- general advice. Forget about it, relax. I am not a girly-girl and couldn't stand half the stuff that they wanted at the wedding and fortunately my husband was in agreement. I had this months long discussion with my mother-in-law who wanted to do these super elaborate souvenirs, which I thought were a total waste of time -- in the end I just told my husband to shut her down and that I'd handle it -- I made cookies and made paper boxes and that was that, everyone liked them and no one ended up with a stupid tchotke on their shelf that they felt bad about throwing out.

Engagement photos -- we liked our photographer though he was always v disorganised. We fought for the price and he agreed and then he could never ever keep straight what we had agreed on. If you want I can pass you his details but definitely negotiate negotiate negotiate with him.

Everyone is going to be constantly telling you that oh you don't have much time and you have to get everything organised, forget it. We did most of our stuff without anyone's help and it all came through in the end. It was actually really annoying that no one helped since the day of our wedding we were up at 7am running around doing errands for other people, including our Argentine relatives, and they all had nice naps while we were up for 26 hours straight, but hey, that's fine, whatever!

If you have any other questions or need a general stress-relief, drop me a line! I can help you with contacts for hair and makeup, where to get flowers if you want to do them yourself, wine, cotillon etc...

Suerte!