First Wedding Anniversary Invitations: Etiquette, Not Paper

Six people around one table: your parents, your brother, two friends. Your first wedding anniversary is a dinner at home, and you're stuck on whether the invitation for it should look like the one you sent last year. Envelope, ribbon, wax seal — or a link you can text on a Tuesday morning.

The short answer: this is a dinner, not a second wedding. The etiquette for a first wedding anniversary invitation comes down to five details, and almost none of them are about paper. Get those five right and the format stops being a problem.

What a first wedding anniversary invitation needs

With six guests, a plain invitation is enough. Rebuilding your wedding stationery — envelope, ribbon, seal — sets the wrong scale; it reads as a bigger event than a table for six. Change the label and the colour, too: 'our first year' instead of 'we're getting married', and a palette you didn't use at the wedding, so nobody who kept the first card reads the same thing twice. Decide the time before you write a single line, because an 'I'll tell you later' on WhatsApp breaks etiquette far more than the wrong card does. And if you don't want gifts, one friendly line settles it: 'the only thing we're asking for is your company.' Silence turns into phone calls.

• Your names, the words 'our first anniversary', and the date.
• The venue: the name, the address, and a map that opens on the phone.
• The time you sit down, written next to the time you arrive.
• Dress code in two words, plus a reply-by date: 'cocktail, by 20 May'.

Card or link: let the etiquette decide

Dinner at home? A personal message with the date, the time and the address meets the etiquette. What doesn't meet it is the same text pasted to ten people, opening with 'hi everyone'.

Booked a bistro for 20:30? Then the invitation has to carry the restaurant's name, its address and a map one tap away — nobody wants to type a street name into their phone on the way there. The practical rule: more guests and more distance, more formality. For a table of eight, a link arrives sooner than anything you would print, and it takes up no space in anyone's kitchen.

The format is your choice. The five details are the etiquette.

Send it once, edit it forever

On Send The Joy you choose a design, try it free in test mode, and unlock every scene when you buy — €29.99 per invitation, one payment, no subscription. Guests open the link in their phone browser without installing anything and reply inside the invitation, so the confirmations land in one ordered list instead of three different chat threads. If the restaurant changes the time or you move to a bigger table, you edit the invitation and the link stays the same: nothing to reprint, nothing to resend. If a grandparent wants something to hold, print two or three copies and send the link to everyone else. Write the five details first, then pick the format — your first anniversary invitation can be ready this afternoon.