The Wedding Day Plan- Need Advice!

[AKY]

Hey everyone!

So I proposed about 10 days ago and now myself and my beautiful fiancee are dipping our toes into the stressful world of wedding planning.. We have been cooking up some ideas and bouncing them back and forth between ourselves and parents and such and I thought I would lay out the idea we have come up with and see what you guys think about it... I am concerned about things like wedding ettiquite and keeping the guest comfortable, so let me know if the plan sounds solid..

A bit of background.. I am 20 years old and in second year university, while my fiancee is going into her second year of college and she will be finished next May and become a dental hygienist.. She has her board exam in mid-late may and a period of 4 weeks after her board exam in which she can't work until she receives the results so we thought we would have our wedding perhaps in the first or second week of June on the 4th or 11th.

Both of us being students, there is not a lot of money to go around. Thankfully I have a very good scholarship and school is pretty cheap in Canada so I have no school debts and I will have a bit saved up for next summer. My fiancee is very good with her money but her program is pretty expensive so she will have some student debt. We have a large network of family and friends/family friends so when we made up the guest list we calculated the people that pretty much need to be at our ceremony to be around 200 people (100 of these people are made up of extended family, she has a largeee family). We decided that we want to have a nice enough wedding but we can't really afford to have a dinner like that for everyone.. We also wanted to do something a bit different since we have been to a lot of dinner weddings...

So here is the plan.. We would like to have a ceremony followed by a hor d'oeuvres reception at the same location with an intimate dinner with immediate family and very close friends in the evening:

The ceremony would be at 1PM at some sort of wedding venue, and preferably outdoor but if not then under a tent or pavillion.. The ceremony would go until about 2PM (we have a pastor who is giving a sermon) and then I would say the receiving line and everything would probably take until 2:30. As soon as the ceremony is over then our hors d'ouevres reception would start.. We don't have a lot of family coming from out of town... She has 2 families coming from st catherines, about 5 hours away, and I have 2 aunts and uncles and g-parents coming from Toronto area.

The hors d'ouvres reception would allow everyone to mingle and we would still mix some traditional things into there and try to have some sort of entertainment... We would go do pictures from 2:30-3:30 I guess and then join everybody at our reception. If it is a nice day then this reception will take place outside and we will have music playing and staff walking around with the trays of hors d'ouevres..

The reception would end at 6PM. After the reception our immediate family, bridal party, grandparents, and close friends (30 people) would meet at a restaurant for a nice evening meal from 7PM to whenever.. Then of course comes our long awaited wedding night but I won't include the plans for that

Does this plan sound like it could work to you guys? There are several issues that I see... We would still send out wedding invitations but we would have no clue how many people would be coming for sure to the wedding because it is traditional to invite anyone from our church to come to the ceremony if they would like... They also might be random friends that we don't know too well and others who are attending the ceremony since it will be an open ceremony. Because the reception will be following in the same location, we obviously cannot specifically invite the people we want to our reception, so the reception would essentially be open to anyone coming to the wedding... Because of this, we definately would not be able to have an open bar.. This also creates issues perhaps with the venue and with how much hors d'oeuvers we order because we don't know how many people that are coming to the ceremony would enjoy the idea of free food.

Any other issues you guys see?

Thanks for listening.

 

[Amanda.Rx]

Congratulations on the engagement! I guess your question, then, is when to have your wedding?

Speaking from experience, I finished school in March, got married in April (had 1 month off), graduated in May, and taking my board exams in June. The 2 weeks prior to the wedding were stressful, and preparing for my board exams is stressful. I cannot IMAGINE doing the 2 at the same time.

That would be my only concern with your plan. She will have to wrap up wedding details while studying for boards at the same time. In my opinion, I would plan the wedding for at least late June, if that time is still open for you both. That way, she''ll have almost the entire month of June free to finish wedding plans and she can focus JUST on her boards in May.

Other things to consider when picking a wedding date: Holidays/festivals around that time (both religious and cultural), other important dates (anniversaries, birthdays), weather (hot, rainy season), availability (June is a popular month!)

Those are just a few of my ideas/suggestions.

 

[Amanda.Rx]

Sorry for my short post- something strange happened and I could only see the 1st 2 paragraphs of your post at first, talking about picking a date!


The rest of the plan sounds pretty good. The only areas I see that maybe could use some tweaking:

1. I''m not sure that all of your guests are going to stick around until 6pm. Most afternoon weddings I''ve been to tend to wrap up an hour or 2 after the ceremony, but I''m not sure if Canadian weddings are different. I''m also not used to an "open" ceremony where anyone can come. That certainly does make it difficult to get a head count.

2. I don''t think you need an entire hour for pictures, but I guess it would depend on how many formal shots you want to take. Our photography session lasted about 15 minutes, but we only took 10 posed photos.

 

[AKY]

Thanks for the quick reply.. No problem with the first post, that was my fault, I pressed enter by mistake and it submitted it so I had to edit it after it posted..

Her exams end in last week of april and there should be 2-3 weeks before the board exam, and then we were hoping to have at least another 2 weeks between the board exam and the wedding day... We aren't sure of the exact day of the board exam yet, but we haven't made any wedding plans so our wedding date is flexible.

As for the other comments:

1) I agree... My dad said to end it around 5, but I said that we could extend it to 6... The only reason I didn't want to end it too early is that some people are driving 5 hours or so and I didn't want their visit to be too short before they had to go back home since they came all the way out here. We have a lot of close relatives like uncles and aunts and other family friends so it is unfortunate that we won't be able to to have them there for everything but I thought the afternoon reception would be a good compromise.

2)I had no clue how much time was needed for pictures.. I did an estimate I just imaged there would be like at least 10 or so minutes of pictures of just myself and the bride, then pictures with our parents, then with our grandparents separately, then with our families on each side, then our families together and with the wedding party... So I thought eh, to get it all set up and done will take at least 30-60 minutes.

As far as the 'open ceremony'.. This of course isn't done with most weddings, but a lot of wedding ceremonies I have been to have been in large churches so there is more then enough room so basically the ceremony is an open invitation to anyone who wants to come and see us get married.. This might include some family friends who we maybe aren't as close to and wouldn't have to the reception (if we did do a dinner reception) and friends from school and stuff who are just casual friends we hang out with.. Obviously people who don't know us at all most likely wouldn't come so it isn't really an issue. At church the weekend before the wedding we would also stand up and let everyone in the church know that they are welcome to come.. we have about 120 people at our church, but I would say probably only like 40 would come most likely.

So this creates the issue of knowing how many people that we have to potentially serve hors d'ouevres to. Normally this is not an issue since the reception is totally seperate, but it does become an issue now. Hmmm.