Wedding Seating For Your Guests

Photo by Tracy Hunter

Once you’ve invited your guests and received your RSVPs so you know who’s coming to the wedding (or after calling all the slackers who didn’t return them on time) it’s time to figure out your wedding seating.

HINT: Wait until you know ALL the guests who will be coming to the wedding, because it’s way too irritating to do arrange your wedding tables twice.

Your caterer or maitre’ d is an excellent source of advice for your wedding seating chart dilemma. I found a few articles that lay out the traditional seating and etiquette wedding concerns.

Where and How To Seat Your Guests - A good overview of the pros and cons of different shaped tables, head table vs. sweetheart table and various family issues you’ll want to consider.

PerfectTablePlan.com - A comprehensive guide to the wedding etiquette and options of seating arrangements, place cards, and some really good advice.

The Seating Arrangements - A step by step guide to your wedding seating the old-fashioned way–pencil, paper and scissors–diagrams of seating with meals and seating guidelines for both Christian and Jewish weddings.

WeddingWire.com - I prefer this online approach to wedding seating charts. You’ll need to set up a free account (they have a spam-free guarantee) then go to My Planner and My Seating. Their seating tool lets you reproduce the dimensions of your reception room, experiment with different table sizes and shapes, and import your guest list. Each guest has a little icon and you can click and drag them around from one table to another. It is SO cool! Really, you’ve gotta check it out.

Seating tips they forget to tell you…

1. Do NOT seat the “old people” in front of the band or DJ’s speakers. They will be miserable. Put your friends and youngsters in front of the music.

2. Seat your older relatives away from the music…but where they can still see the festivities. Otherwise, they’ll be complaining to you all night.

3. When your parents are demanding that your guests be seated one way…and your friends are demanding something else…do what YOU want. Heck, they’re not going to be chained to their table for six hours! If they don’t like who they’re sitting with, they can mingle and get some exercise.

4. When choosing the font for your table names, numbers and guest place cards, choose a font that’s LARGE and EASY TO READ. Sure, those fancy scripts look pretty…but wait until you see the long lines when far-sighted guests are searching for their names. Make everything bigger than you think it needs to be; it will avoid wasted time–and guest frustration–on your wedding day.

Got any tips or suggestions about deciding on your wedding tables? Leave me a comment.