Having a wedding ceremony which is attended only by family and few friends is almost impossible for Balinese. In Balinese society, wedding ceremony is not a ceremony that can be managed solely by the bride and groom, and they do not have a full authority to decide who is going to be invited to attend the ceremony. For this matter it is a family business. “Who is going to be invited?” is a question that usually the parent of the groom has the final words for the answer.

So who is going to be invited in traditional Balinese wedding ceremony? Since all members of the families, relatives, clan (especially who live near the groom house) and sometimes member of the hamlet usually participate in the preparation of the wedding ceremony, they are among the first on the list. They have been worked hard to prepare the wedding ceremony and they deserve to share the joy of the wedding ceremony. Next on the list are relatives and the member of the clan that live far from the couple’s house. They are important for the family prestige; weeding ceremony is a chance for the groom’s family to show to other families that they have many relatives and their clan members respect their family by attending the wedding ceremony. Than after these, come the friends of the bride and groom and friends of both families.

With all these invitees, the number of the attendees can easily reach two or three hundreds. But that the way it is. Forget to invite a friend on a traditional Balinese wedding ceremony can be forgiven. But failure to invite the relatives or clan members is another story. In some areas in Bali, it is considered an insult, since it is a disrespectful act, ignoring the bond of the blood; it is considered that the families of the couple think that the uninvited relatives and clan members are not important enough to be invited. Balinese do their best to avoid this kind of negligence, and put the question “who is going to be invited?” as the foremost thing to be discussed in preparing a wedding ceremony.

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