Extended family guests

FH and I have 20 aunts and uncles between us (not including their spouses). With cousins and their families, we'd be at over 200 with family alone. We each narrowed it down to about 50 to invite total. My parents are contributing some, so I felt it was important to invite their siblings. I only invited one cousin from my side. FH only invited 3 aunts/uncles who he was close to and their kids.

I think it's perfectly fair to whittle down your list. FH's grandmother is one of 10, many of them are married, so that alone would've put us in nearly 2 dozen people in just the grandparents and great aunts/uncles! We chose not to buy any of them, aside from FH's grandparents, and although we were met with a lot of animosity about it, honestly, you can't please everyone the matter how hard you try. The best thing I can recommend at this point, is looking at one of those online lists where it suggests weeding through a list of questions to figure out whether someone should or should not be invited. (I.e.-"Has your spouse met this person?") and going from there. It really helped us! We cut over 100 people off & honestly, our day won't be any less fun w/o them!

Picking and choosing aunts and uncles is not a good idea in my opinion, it will cause a lot of tension and fights in your family. Unless you have cut out an estranged person from your life for a good reason, that would be the exception to the rule.

We were also in a situation where extended family members would have taken up 85% of our guest list and it was inflating our guest list to such an unrealistic number, we struggled with the idea for a while, but eventually decided to cut extended family across the board. Making an exception for one person, would not be fair to everyone else that we were unable to invite. If your family is local, I could see just invite aunts and uncles and not cousins, but much of our families would be traveling and we did not feel that it was fair to ask them all to travel to our wedding and then not invite their kids.

For us, it was parents, siblings and grandparents only. It literally cut 150+ people from our guest list. We still love them, but we don't have the money for a family reunion.