Wedding timeline

I would start the ceremony at 4:30.

View Quoted Comment Why? 4:30pm?

View Quoted Comment I just worked backwards. You said the ceremony would take about an hour and it’s a 30 minute drive without traffic. This would put the ceremony being done at 5:30 and give you a 30 minute buffer for the receiving line and for people to leave and get to the reception for cocktail hour.

View Quoted Comment What about doing pictures after church?

View Quoted Comment You said you wanted to be in your cocktail hour so because of that you can’t have it both ways. You’ll have to do a first look and get pictures done before the ceremony or do pictures while guests are at the cocktail hour which is what most people do. We did a first look because being in our cocktail hour was a priority for us!

View Quoted Comment Hmm . So doing pictures from 5pm to 6pm wont work ?

View Quoted Comment Your guests would have nothing to do during that time is the thing. They would have to just sit in their cars and wait for you to be done doing pictures to start cocktail hour.

Most churches give you a 1PM or a 3PM start time, you don't really get to pick the time, especially if you're getting married on a Saturday. (This is due to 5PM Mass.)

You might need to talk to your church and your venue, and then account for the gap.

You should probably move up your cocktail hour to start at 5, and do pictures from 5-6 while guests are being hosted at the cocktail hour, assuming a 3 pm ceremony start time.

View Quoted Comment Cocktail hour was created for guests to have something to do between the ceremony and reception while the bride and groom take pictures. As Kelly said, 1 way to get around missing cocktail hour is to have a first look and get all the pictures done before the ceremony. Otherwise, your guests are left with nothing to do and nowhere to really go for an hour between events, which is considered bad hosting. For reference, I had a 1st look and did not feel like it took anything away from that moment I saw him at the altar. I haven't really met any brides who felt that way. In fact, I'm actually really glad we did one. It was really special to just have some time alone with just us to really soak it all in before everything ramped up.

The church usually gives your a ceremony time, ours did at least. Because we're getting married on a Sat and in a catholic church, our wedding has to be at 1 or 1:30 (depends on if you're having mass or not), ours will be an hour long. Unfortunately for my side of the bridal party, the entire morning is taken up with hair and makeup. We have approx 5.5 hours to do that, then have a 20 min drive to the church... get ready and have some photos done. The groomsmen will be able to have their photo done before the wedding, my side and then the entire bridal party will have to be photographed after the ceremony. So the ceremony is 1-2 followed by photos at the church... a 20 min drive to the venue, photos there and dinner will start at 530 (it will take 2 hours to serve everyone --250+ guests). We decided that cocktail hour will be 4-530 i think. I know there's time in there, but we have a lot of out of town guests with kids so it gives them time to do what they need to do with them. We've been to weddings with time gaps in the recent past and it was never an issue for us.