Do you R.S.V.P. ?

R.S.V.P. is French for, “répondez, s’il vous plaît,” which means “please reply.”

Go ahead, say it. It’s fun!

You see it on the bottom of nearly every birthday party invite, event flyer, and evite.  Yet, we seem to ignore it anymore these days.

It’s becoming a lost art.  An etiquette practice of the past.

I consider myself a little old fashioned. A little.  But being on the party planning side of things as a military spouse and hosting many spouse coffees, I totally appreciate the whole R.S.V.P thing.  Now, I’m not dogging military wives.  I’ve also thrown a few birthday parties in my day, having four kids, and civilians are just as guilty of NOT responding.  It really is, I think, disrespectful to completely ignore the R.S.V.P. request when you have been invited to a party or event. There is a lot of planning going on for some of these events and knowing who and who isn’t coming makes things much easier on everyone. There is food to prepare, parting gifts to put together, and venues to notify of party sizes.

Real life example:

I hosted a monthly coffee for the spouses in my husbands squadron a while back. We are a very large group, so there were literally more than 60 people invited.  Per tradition, we send out an evite via www.evite.com to the whole group.  I planned on baking lots of goodies for us all to enjoy during our coffee.  See, the thing about baking is, it helps to know how many people you will be feeding… same thing goes for any type of food. Of the 60+ people invited, only a dozen responded yay or nay.  So that left more than 40-50 people unaccounted for.  Granted, I knew most of them would not be coming, but say I only planned for 12 people, and 60 showed up.  I’d be short on food!

Can you imagine if that scenario was for a birthday party?

What if you had invited 60 kids.
(I’d say you were crazy….okay maybe this was a bad example, but lets roll with it)

Only 12 replied yes.

Would you go and buy 60 goodie bags anyways? Just in case?

No one wants to make a kid cry because they didn’t get a goodie bag!!!

See how responding to an RSVP would be nice?

I hope reading this will empower that little angel on your shoulder to tell you to take that extra 2 seconds to répondez, s’il vous plaît. The host will love you forever!

So, be honest… do you R.S.V.P. ?