Did you cancel your planned wedding in favour of something smaller? Did you regret it?

We had planned for a traditional wedding at a small venue with a formal ceremony and reception. We were hoping to invite ~40 of our closest family members and friends. This was the idea we had for about two full years before COVID. We spent the majority of 2019 looking for venues and vendors. We switched the entire thing to an initiate elopement on the beach in November 2020. Honestly, we are so glad we did. We spent the entire time stress-free enjoying our mini vacation. No regrets whatsoever. We got all the special vendors we wanted and got to spend the day after the wedding on the beach.

I have no experience to share, I just wanted to say how sorry I am for you that you are going through this. We have family in Australia and they are beyond stressed out over the on-going shutdowns.... Hang in and good luck to you, whatever you decide!

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Thank you It's a bit crazy here because we have had less infections the last 18 months than the UK did in an entire day (albeit we are a much larger country with a smaller population) and yet our government has been quite strict about things because our plan of attack is to stop the virus altogether.

December seems a world away but I am just so over everything that I actually think at this point I'd rather lose $9,000 on our original reception venue and just have a smaller wedding. Watch this space...

We got married in December, and the September before made the decision to have a super small wedding: parents, sisters and 5 friends each. We went from expecting 120 guests to having 17 there. I don’t regret a thing, but am sad that my grandparents couldn’t be there (they’re in a different country).
The day ended up really being about us, and not about making sure all the family is having a great time. It was very enjoyable and much less stressful.
Because we were still able to have our best friends there, it felt more “ok” to not have a big wedding: we really had our closest, people we will be able to count on for many more years.Plus we saved sooooooo much money (we spent not even a third of our big wedding budget)

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I am so glad to hear it all worked out and that you really managed to enjoy yourselves! I actually think at this point even if everyone somehow manages to get vaccinated before our wedding and the restrictions lift (unlikely since the government's rollout of the vaccines has been shocking) I feel like it'll be so nice to just not have all that worry and stress.

Other than not having your grandparents there, did everything else make the day feel magical?

The main thing I always wanted for my wedding was for anyone who wanted to be there to be able to be there. I had dreamed of inviting my church family from back home and my church family now. I serve(d) on the worship band for both, so I knew/know basically the entire congregation. I'm also a social dancer and involved with pretty much every dance scene in my area. Blues, lindy hop, west coast swing, line dancing, etc. So obviously I wanted those people there too. And then my husband proposed October of last year and, knowing that we didn't want a long engagement, those plans had to change. To be entirely fair, they would have had to change anyway because there's no way we would have been able to afford that many people.

So we got married 3 months ago, just after CA finally started allowing receptions again. We ended up having a total of about 75 guests at the ceremony, 15 of which were not able to stay for the reception. Honestly? It was perfect and exactly what it needed to be. The smaller number of people meant we were able to spend more time actually connecting with those who were there. I have anxiety disorder, so as much as I love all those people I very well may have just been an anxiety-ridden mess if they had all been there. We still have friends telling us how much fun they had at our wedding, which is huge for me since I planned it.

It's definitely not what I ever envisioned, but do I have any regrets? Absolutely not.

Like the previous posters, we too had planned a large wedding (250 people) and revamped our wedding to a much smaller one (20 people). I call my wedding my COVID rainbow. I never would have considered a smaller wedding outside of COVID. The pandemic definitely forced my hand, but I have no regrets. The one thing my husband and I promised ourselves is that we would not cheat ourselves from a full wedding experience even if it was small so we went all out -- I wore my original dress, he had a custom suit, we splurged on invitations, decor and food, we held the ceremony and reception at a destination beach resort (our guests loved it so much some of them have returned for weekend getaways since the wedding), we had traditional wedding and reception elements. Once the decision was made to go with our Plan B wedding, it felt like the weight of the world was off of our shoulders, and we never looked back. My wedding was better than I ever dreamed - even if it was smaller than I originally anticipated.