Postage Madness

Who would have thought that a little postage stamp could produce such huge headaches? In the grand scheme of wedding planning, I considered postage stamps to be a fairly small consideration--not worth a great deal of thought. I was pleased with myself a few months ago when I discovered the Website zazzle.com, where it is actually possible to purchase customized postage stamps. For not much extra money, I purchased some lovely "G" monogram stamps to use on thank-you notes, wedding invitations, and RSVP cards. And I was especially pleased because they were forever stamps, purchased at .41 cents each but useable even after postage rates went up.

However, I am quickly learning that in wedding planning, you really never can get too far ahead. This weekend as my mom, sister-in-law, niece, Katie, and I were collating and stuffing envelopes with invitations, I noticed a little suggestion from the makers of the invitations that I have the invitations weighed before mailing them out. I thought for a moment how embarrassing it would be if people had to pay extra postage to receive wedding invitations and quickly decided that it would be worth a quick trip to the mailroom at work to find out if my G stamps would do the job.

As Teresa, our expert mailroom person, took the invitation in hand, she knowingly commented that the invitation was probably going to require more postage than a typical letter, and weighing it only confirmed that reality. I told myself that we could still use the G stamps--on thank-you notes, on anything, really, that needed to be mailed. They were not a loss. I'd just head out to the post office at lunchtime and get what I needed, and the invitations would be in the mail by this Friday--right on schedule.

Who can fathom the reasoning of the US Postal Service, however? The postal clerk weighed the invitation, told me that it would cost .59 cents to mail each one, and I observed a poster with a wedding stamp on it. I said, "Can I get 70 of those?"

"No," she responded, "those won't be available till mid-June." Hasn't the US Postal Service heard of June weddings, which would require wedding postage stamps to be available by late April to early May? At this point, I decided to exhibit my maturity by finding out my other options. There was probably a pretty flower stamp or something attractive that I could use to mail my lovely invitations.

I discovered that the US Postal Service is charging us all .59 cents for mailings of two ounces, but does not yet have stamps available. One option was to purchase the above shown 2007 wedding stamp and add a .01 cent stamp with a Tiffany lamp on it. I would have to go downtown to the post office there, however, to purchase the dated wedding stamps. Another possibility was to use the .42 cent G stamps and add a .17 cent blue stamp with a ram's head on it. Then there's always metered postage, which the clerk told me I wouldn't want to do. I could have purchased stamps that cost .63 cents that were some kind of an orange shade, and there was another stamp in the .60-.70 cent range (the options began to blur after a while) of a river cutting through a hilly area, but for the extra cost, neither of them said anything of elegance, love, marriage, or romance.

Of course, the Friday deadline loomed ever before me, but I turned again to zazzle.com. In hindsight, I had decided that even though the G stamps were classy looking, they probably weren't the best choice, since I had G monogram seals for the envelopes, and the fonts really didn't match. So this gave me the opportunity to select an image that would be even more attractive and eye catching than the G.

This whole experience leads me to several questions, to which I do not have answers. Please, please leave your theories in the comments, because I really want to know.

~Why, in the grand scheme of things, do I care whether there's a blue ram's head stamp accompanying a G stamp on my invitation envelopes?

~How was I ever able to convince a man with Henry's maturity level to drop what he was doing to surf zazzle.com to find a suitable replacement for the G stamp?

~Has anyone ever really noticed the postage that came on a wedding invitation? Did it ever affect anyone's decisions on whether to attend?

~Will this be the biggest crisis Henry and I will ever face together?

~Who is the genius behind the US Postal Service who increases the rates yet makes it impossible for customers to buy postage?

~Why do there have to be so many pieces that go into the wedding invitation envelopes, making them too heavy to require regular postage, and is the CIA somehow involved in this?

~Have you ever considered fonts on a postage stamp before reading this blog posting?

Anyway--I paid extra postage to zazzle.com so that I can receive new postage in a couple of days to replace the inadequate postage I originally purchased because I was unable to purchase adequate postage from the post office. Hopefully this is the only glitch in the wedding planning, and things will all resolve so easily, at so little cost. And the invitations will go out on time. And from here on, let us all pay attention to the stamps that come on wedding invitations; some bride (and groom, possibly) has thought longer and harder than anyone ever should about it!