8/8/2020 wedding in Chicago burbs - no idea what to do about Covid....

I'm a July 18 Chicago suburb bride with a guest list of 200+ people, and I just started the process of postponing our wedding. Even as Illinois starts to reopen, and even if the rules end up being more flexible than it currently seems, I just don't see any way groups of over 50 will be allowed this summer.


Lollapalooza has a ton of $$ and contracts and sponsors and legal stuff on the line, so I wouldn't look to them for guidance on when to make your decision. They can wait until the very last minute if they want to. Pitchfork only just made the call, and they are in July.
I completely understand the frustration of debating options between downsizing, rescheduling, and when to reschedule. We rescheduled our July wedding to April 2021 because I share your sentiments of not wanting to wait a full year, and at least it might not be freezing then
But we also decided that if there are still gathering restrictions in place at that time, we are just going to move forward with 50 or 100 or whatever we're allowed + move on with our lives.
Wishing you the best of luck as you figure out what works best for you! I really felt a lot better after speaking to my venue about their options.

We live in the suburbs of Chicago but our wedding was planned for the city. We had to postpone our big April 350 guest wedding only a month before the big day. That was extremely devastating for us. We had all this stuff with our date on it, hotel welcome bags all ready, and all we had left to do was show up on our wedding day. Thankfully, we were able to still get married on our date with just our immediate family. I didn't get to wear my dress because it's stuck at the bridal shop in the middle of alterations(but I wouldn't have worn it anyway...saving it for the big wedding). We postponed our wedding to September 13th but made the decision last week to push it back to next year. We want to have the amazing wedding we had been planning for and we feel that even by September, we would have to cut our guest list down A LOT and potentially have everyone wearing masks. So we'll have a vow renewal next year and we're pretty excited about it. So I totally understand where you are coming from, but at this point I think large gatherings won't happen potentially for the rest of the year. Maybe you can still get married on your date but have the celebration next year? Especially if your date is important to you like ours was to us. I wish you the best of luck and I hope whatever you choose to do makes you happy!

Also in the Chicago burbs. Our wedding was scheduled for 8/1/20 but we decided to postpone to next year. Most of our guests were expecting us to postpone. Instead, we’ll still be getting married on our original date with just immediate family. I totally understand about the cold weather, I’m not very happy about our wedding being rescheduled in April since we all know April can still be cold and rainy. But at this point we didn’t care, as long as we were able to have our wedding.

I’m in Chicago as well, with their 5 phase rollout they do not predict gatherings of 50+ people (if that) this summer. You can still have a formal gathering of that size! Doesn’t mean it has to be casual.

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Ugh yea- that's a good point about the Pitchfork timing. I think I'm just in denial 😭so I cling to anything that gives me hope lol. Like part of my brain keeps saying there is a chance that we'll be able to have the full-sized wedding in August but maybe I'm crazy.

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Omg that makes me so sad about all the things you had with the date on it 😞 ugh I'm so sorry. So for your vow renewal next year, do you plan to treat that just like a regular wedding ceremony? I was thinking about that same option - and the ceremony is so important to me - so I couldn't decide, if we needed to postpone, if we should postpone everything or still do a courthouse thing on our original date. It's such a hard decision! Bc I don't want the ceremony to be any less special - but I'm likely overthinking this bc this has sent me into such a mental frenzy lol

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Will you plan to do the ceremony as normal next year in April? Or just the reception? Also, just out of curiosity, what is the reason you guys are still getting married on the original date instead of delaying that until next year April as well? (all things I'm trying to consider 😖)

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Ugh yea I think I'm hoping for some kind of a miracle at this point. I tried to narrow our list down to 50 but we have such huge families and my fiance has so many close friends that I am struggling to see how it could work. And I love our venue space but it is huge so it would be strange to still use that space for just 50. So I feel like I am stuck between sticking with the wedding we have planned but delaying it another year or changing our plans completely. I hate both options haha but clearly I'm going to have to stop sulking and get over it soon 😩

View Quoted Comment I feel you! For our ceremony next year, I plan on having our officiant rewrite everything to follow a vow renewal. We didn’t make our own vows or anything so really the only personalized thing was the story of how we met and we aren’t religious so it was generally a short ceremony to begin with. I’d still like that personalized story of us included along with the story of this whole Covid issue and us getting married on our original date. But we’ll still walk down the aisle to our songs and the bridal party will walk too. Plus, our ceremony decor was going to be amazing so I don’t want that to go to waste haha. We did talk about skipping all the reception stuff like first dance and all those formalities. At that point we just want to party with our loved ones and eat all the amazing food/desserts!

View Quoted Comment We’re going to have our church ceremony and reception in April as if we weren’t already married. We still want to get married on our original date because that date became special to us when we first chose that day when we picked out our venue. Also, because of covid you never know what’s going to happen next year even. If we can’t have our big wedding next year, at least we’ll already be married which was the main priority all along. We’ve been together almost 8 years, we just don’t want to wait anymore

My heart is with you. My wedding is on July 25th in Milwaukee. We've been clinging on to hope that we will be able to have our wedding, but it is just so hard to know when to pull the plug. All of the big summer events here have been cancelled, and the DNC which should be here mid-August is now talking about a virtual convention. The venue seems confident about being in normal operations by late June, but I think anyone's guess is good at any at this point. Our Safer at Home order ends on May 26th so I think after that point I may have a better understanding of how things will be moving forward. So heartbreaking. Hugs to you.

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It could end up being a blessing in disguise, having the venue "too big". I think social distancing will end up being a key piece of reopening, so that may mean having tables a certain distance apart, limited members per table, etc. Fingers crossed!

We just decided to change ours to a backyard wedding. All of our vendors are working with us and changing our packages to accommodate the decrease in guests. Our only issue is we may be losing money from the venue itself.