Addressing Etiquette

Near the end of October, my son is becoming a Bar Mitzvah, and we are having a reception after the ceremony that has completely gotten out of control. I get that it is essentially a birthday party for a 13 year old boy, but considering the DJ and photographer and formal invitations, it is more like a wedding – the full blown, she-planned-it-since-she-was-a-little-girl type. Add to the mix that my son is the first boy to have a Bar Mitzvah ceremony in about 20 years in my family, and you have one potent cocktail.

No pressure.

Recently, we sent out the invitations. The invitations just might be the most stressful thing I have had to deal with in recent years, and this includes jury trials, broken bones, surgeries, and illnesses that people die of. Picking out the invitations was easy. It got to crunch time, and I forced Jacob to sit with me at the computer for (what I thought was to be) a long evening of combing through websites for ideas. I pulled up one site with about 200 Bar Mitzvah invitation ideas. He pointed to a blue one and said, “I like that one,” and walked away. He was done. In two years, I expect the same process will take two weeks with my daughter. That was the last easy part, though.

First of all, the guest list itself was a mess. Who do you invite? This is, after all, a 13 year old’s birthday party. It is his show. So his friends, yeah. But which of his friends’ parents? How about their younger or older siblings? What about my friends? What about my friends whose kids my son doesn’t care for? (No, of COURSE I don’t mean your kids – I mean those other kids.) What about the relatives he doesn’t know, or even know of? Balance that with the fact that I believe that sending an invitation can easily be seen as a “send my son a gift” notice, and I don’t want to force people to give him a gift if I know they can’t come. There is no doubt that despite putting the list together for the better part of two months that I left off someone critical, and someone’s feelings will get hurt. So know this: I want to invite everyone. I do. But at 50 bucks a head I can’t. And you? You were actually invited, only the invitation got lost in the mail or was undeliverable as addressed.

Why? You ask. Why was it undeliverable as addressed? Well, partly it is because I had this moronic idea that hand addressing the envelopes (as opposed to mail-merge address labels) would be more personal. Once upon a time I took calligraphy classes. I know there are those felt tip pens with the slant on the tip where if you just write marginally neatly it can look like calligraphy. I can *do* this, I thought. Why not?

My children both have relatively neat handwriting, and I also figured that my son could do a good bit of the addressing himself. I unearthed some of my old calligraphy practice books, gave him a pen, and told him to practice. His sister wanted to practice, too. Jacob immediately told her that she could not address any invitations, because it was HIS Bar Mitzvah and he didn’t want her to participate. This made her really really want to. So I told her she could do her own friends’ envelopes.

And so we began. I very quickly learned that, along with cursive, they no longer teach schoolchildren how to address an envelope. We didn’t exactly have too many extra envelopes, and it took me too long to realize that they didn’t know to put the address in the center of the envelope, or that the name went first; then the street address on the next line; nor that the city, state, and zip, in that order, went on the third line. Some of them I just left, if the name was legible and the zip code was obviously a zip code.

They also didn’t know standard conventions about how to address married couples or families. The whole Mrs. Ms. Miss conundrum was a mystery to them. I remember learning all this mess back in my English class (back when it was called an English class, and not ‘language arts’) sometime in the late 1970’s. There were, however, a number of conventional problems that Mrs. Roth never taught me: What do you do when there are three last names within a family? (Her maiden name, his last name, and the kids’ father’s last name.) What do you do with the lesbian couple who has the same last name? The lesbian couple with different last names and whose kids hyphenate? With the couple that is separated but not divorced? The divorced couple that shares custody – do the kids get invited from both addresses? What about when she is a doctor but he isn’t? To be honest, I got tired of trying to figure it all out and took my best guess at some of it. (“The Smith Family,” for example, even though her last name isn’t Smith, and her other kid, who is invited, has the last name of Jones because he has a different dad and, well, because my head hurts, and if you’re my friend and want to partake in the Festive Meal you’ll just shake your head at my laziness and forgive me.)

Eventually, we got them all addressed. My daughter, after her hard fought and won battle to participate in the addressing party, addressed all of two envelopes before deciding that it was not only work, but boring thankless work at that. She wandered off to watch episodes of “Cake Boss” on Netflix and was no more help.

Then we had to stuff them. I thought we had a pretty nifty assembly line system, until we realized that approximately every other envelope my son stuffed had a response card but no reply envelope. After several deep breaths, we held the envelopes up to the light and felt them for appropriate thickness before carrreeeeeefullllllyyyyyy opening the envelopes and retaping them with the proper contents inside. I was fairly angry at his carelessness, but then we compromised and decided that I wouldn’t be mad any more if he let me write about his boneheadedness.

Joke’s on him, though. The thank you notes haven’t even begun yet.

Lori B. Duff is the author of the Amazon ‘Hot New Release’ Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza, a collection of autobiographical humor essays. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/loribduffauthor For more information about Lori and updates about her writing, go to www.loriduffwrites.com