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In Britain arrangements for inviting and entertaining guests at a wedding are usually the responsibility of the bride's family. In most cases it is mainly friends and relations of both families who are invited. But when the bride"s father is a businessman of some kind, the wedding reception may provide a useful occasion for establishing social connections with clients or customers and other people whose goodwill may be of advantage to him. It is, however, the bride's mother who has the job of sending out the formal printed invitation cards.

In the case of a church wedding, the vicar of each parish in which the bride and bridegroom live is normally informed about a month in advance of the ceremony so that an announcement of the coming wedding can be made in church on each of three Sundays before it takes place. Anyone who may know of an existing marriage of either partner is ordered to give information about it, through this means of avoiding bigamy( 重婚 )must have been more effective in the days when people moved about the world less than they do today. Often up to a hundred or more people attend the religious service and the bride usually wears the traditional long white dress and veil, while her bridesmaids, who are often children, wear long dresses in attractive colors. This may also happen in the case of a civil wedding in a register office but is probably less usual.

The reception which follows may be held in a restaurant, a local hall or, when there are few guests, in the bride's own home. Refreshments are provided, a special iced wedding- cake is cut usually to the accompaniment of speeches and distributed to the guests, toasts are drunk and dancing may follow. At some point in the celebrations, the bride goes off to change into everyday clothes and then leaves the party with her husband to go on their honeymoon, the journey they will make together, often in romantic surroundings abroad.