Wedding Reception Seating Charts
How to Seat Your Guests to Avoid Family Politics & Hurt Feelings
Dec 17, 2007
Ready to write the seating chart for your wedding reception? This could be such an easy task if it weren't for family politics, friendship rifts, and other messy situations. Here's how to go about making an effective seating chart.
Get Help From Family Members
Don't try to do the seating chart all by yourself. It's helpful if you can enlist one person from each side of the family, like the two mothers. Family members will know who needs to be seated together, and who needs to be seated as far away from each other as possible. Older family members probably know the intricacies of family politics better than you.
Organize Your Seating Chart
Once you have some help lined up, get organized. Collect all your RSVPs, and make an effort to call people who have not RSVPed to see if they are coming. Next, get a map of the reception hall so you can visualize where all the tables will be. Find out how many people can be seated at each table. Once you have this information, it's just a matter of plugging people into the available seats, right? If only it were that easy. To make this task simpler, write down the name of guests and their dates on index cards, or use the RSVP cards for this purpose.
Seat the Bridal Party
Decide where you want the bride, groom, and bridal party to sit. Do you want the whole party sitting together? Or do you want the bride and groom to sit at a table alone, with the attendants scattered among the rest of the guests? If you do create a formal head table for the bridal party, put them in the front of the hall where everyone can see them and snap pictures. Dates of bridal party members will need to be seated with other guests.
Seat the Parents and Close Family
Next, create tables for your families. Typically, Table #1 will be reserved for the bride's family and Table #2 for the groom's, although if the immediate families are large, more than one table may be used. These tables should seat people such as parents, grandparents, siblings, and other immediate relatives. Be careful: if you leave someone out who believes they belong at this main table, there will be hurt feelings. If you have divorced parents, stepparents, or anyone else in the immediate family who do not want to be seated together, consider using multiple tables.
Seat Families Together
As you organize the rest of the guests, take your index cards and make little piles of families. Families should be placed together unless there are serious family politics. If you have small groups of families, you may want to combine them with another small family group from the other side of the family to encourage mingling. If you do this, try to choose families that seem compatible.
Seat Friends, Coworkers, Neighbors, and Other Groups Together
Take your index cards and make little piles of friendship groups. Keep these people together. To encourage mingling, seat small groups of friends together that seem compatible. Do the same thing with groups of coworkers, neighbors, people you know from a particular organization, and anyone else who knows each other as a group.
Children's Tables
If you have lots of children who are old enough to sit alone, consider creating a special children's table. Try to group kids together who are in the same age group. Depending on the age of the children, you can put some activities on the children's table for them to complete.
Tables for Singles
Weddings are great places for singles to meet, so place singles at tables together. Be cognizant of which of your single friends might like each other and which might not. When making tables full of singles, try to make sure everyone present knows at least one other person so they won't feel totally on the spot.
Rules of Thumb
When seating people, use common sense. Place people together who like each other and try to separate people who don't want to be together. Keep family politics in mind and try to avoid offending someone by seating them in the "wrong" place. Here are some rules of thumb to follow.
- Make sure all couples are seated together, along with their young children.
- Keep exes apart.
- As much as possible, keep people apart who actively dislike each other.
- Don't try to mix people who have very different political opinions or religious beliefs.
- Be mindful of the politics of stepfamilies. In most cases, seat extended stepfamilies together to avoid hurt feelings--unless you know for a fact that they do not want to sit together.
- Elderly and disabled people should be seated in an easily accessible area.
- If you have guests who are obnoxious, be careful where you seat them. You may want to seat them together.
Accounting for Unexpected Guests
The final headcount is never perfect. Some guests who said they were coming will not, and some guests will show up unexpectedly or bring an extra person. It's a good idea to keep an extra table or two on hand in case this happens. However, you can also plug extra people into spots reserved for the no-shows.
Try not to stress out too much about the seating chart. Make an effort to seat people in the most appropriate way possible. Ultimately, though, people are responsible for their own baggage, so if two enemies wind up next to each other despite your careful planning, so be it.
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