Small ceremony with postponed reception?

Yes, except we are not having the big wedding later.

My FH wanted a large wedding as well. I told him that if he and his parents wanted to spend $10,000 to $30,000 then go right ahead but my parents and I would not be going over a certain frugal amount. He laughed and really thought weddings couldnt be that expensive. He and his parents researched and quickly changed their minds to my tiny simple wedding idea lol

I still have student loans and we want to save for a house so we really didn't want to spend thousands of dollars on a wedding and reception.

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Thanks for the help! I told my fiancé the same thing and his parents decided to only contribute a small portion. We thought we could do a wedding for $7,000 but it's impossible with the number of people he wants to invite. I'm worried about putting even $7,000 into the wedding and then it get postponed/cancelled due to covid. I'm a college student so it's not possible to afford more than that right now but I'm not sure he'd be okay with no reception. Maybe it would be an option to do a anniversary party somewhere down the line? Also, did you send out wedding announcements to the people that weren't invited to your wedding?

View Quoted Comment Yes, I plan on sending out marriage announcements with an explanation of why we chose a tiny wedding (only our parents are invited) due to COVID and our parents' fear of indoor dining. Then we'll provide the link to our honeyfund 🍯 if they would like to contribute. We probably will do this a month after we marry.

Totally agree with all of this. And people shouldn't be getting offended at a time like this...they know there are statewide gathering restrictions everywhere so it's really not even up to us. Go with the small ceremony, throw the big party later!

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Yikes. You're planning on sending out the link to your Honeyfund in your wedding announcements??

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Thanks for the advice!

It's completely fine to do this given the circumstances! Our friends are eloping in Hawaii with just them, then coming back to have a large reception with everyone.

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I'm so relieved to hear that other people are doing this! Thanks for sharing!

Many Covid brides are doing exactly this

We did this because our venue was not opening and we didn't want to wait another year to get married. We had a private ceremony with 15 people in all (my husband and myself, our parents, a sibling each, officiant and his wife, and our 2 photographers). We will be having our reception next November when it's hopefully safe to have large gatherings again.

That is one of our alternatives if we have to postpone cause of covid. Just a small wedding ceremony with the bigger reception later.

View Quoted Comment No problem Elizabeth...good luck!

We originally planned a 60-80 person wedding and ended up eloping at the last minute with just our parents and a few close friends - 12 people total including our photographer, officiants, and ourselves, plus our dog. It was super short, outdoors, everyone stood throughout our ceremony, which was maybe 10 minutes at most, and we followed by doing our first dance played on a bluetooth speaker, popping a bottle of champagne, and cutting a cake. That was it. We spent a bit of time before and after doing photos with our photographer and that was probably the only part that felt special and like a real wedding to me. My husband's parents wouldn't hug us at all because they were so worried about Covid, and it was so awkward because no one really knew what to do or felt comfortable. I felt like it was the best we could do given the circumstances, but it was really short and anticlimactic, disappointing, and didn't feel celebratory at all.

I think if you can do a small ceremony that feels special, go for it. If it's possible to include family in a way where everyone feels safe, and it feels like an intimate, special shared experience, it can be really nice to do a smaller more intentional event. However, I feel like if you have people you want there who won't really be able to embrace the experience, whether because of health concerns or whatever, it will be more noticeable in a smaller group. It will be difficult to enjoy yourself if you feel on guard and like you need to hold back. At least that was my experience. At our ceremony, with fewer than 10 guests, the fact that we didn't have any close interaction with our loved ones felt very noticeable. I've been with my husband for more than 5 years and we've been married for over 6 months and there isn't a single photo of me with my in-laws in the whole world. My mom asked permission to hug me at my own wedding, and later apologized to me for asking my husband permission to hug him because she was worried she put him on the spot and felt guilty about it. It feels bad, and when I think about our wedding day those moments stick out more to me than the beautiful ones. In that case, just include the people you know you can celebrate with in the way you want to, or elope and just focus on you and your partner and no one else. Then bring the people you want to celebrate with together for your reception when it is safe to do so. I wish that is what we had done.

I ended up doing this and my family was pretty understanding given the circumstances.

We had a Zoom with our pastor/officiant, my husband's parents, and just us, and dropped off our marriage license to our pastor afterwards. My family had had a bit of a Covid scare at home so we didn't want it to be in person. In addition, we told our family that we'll eventually have our mini wedding celebration, it just might be postponed. The reason we excluded them from the Zoom was because we still want to make our wedding day special and save a lot of big moments for that day.

View Quoted Comment Hi, November has long passed. Were you able to have your reception? Did you do a vow renewal at your bigger reception? We’re due to have our postponed reception on our first anniversary on 4/2 and we’re conflicted on whether or not we want to do a vow renewal!

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Hi Kimberly,

I responded to your comment on the other thread, but I'll post here, too. We ended up ultimately canceling our reception. We decided that we didn't want to spend so much money on a party over a year after our wedding. Instead, we have put that money toward our honeymoon for this summer. We lost a bit on non-refundable deposits, but saved much more than we lost.

Had we gone through with the reception, we would not have had a vow renewal ceremony. It seemed unnecessary to go through the motions just for other people when we already shared our personal vows with each other in 2020. Our reception would have just been a big party.

View Quoted Comment I didn’t even realize it was you on both posts. My bad! Haha. Unfortunately we had all of our vendors booked with deposits down so that was the only reason we decided to push forward (we’re doing our “wedding” under 10k so it’s not a significant difference since a lot of our vendors were half down.) My husband and I both don’t want to redo the ceremony since we felt our minimony was perfect and we just want to celebrate at this point (and I saved my dress,) but we’ve been getting some pushback from family so I guess I’m just kinda of trying seek validation for sticking with our plan. Thank you for taking the time to respond!

View Quoted Comment Yeah, I think we probably ended up losing around 3k in deposits, but our catering bill would have been 13k, so while it was sad to lose the money, it would have been a way larger chunk at the end of it all.