Wedding Tips: The Two Most Important Times of Your Wedding

You'll have many vitally important "moments" on your wedding day, for example: the first time your dad sees you in your dress, when the vicar announces that you're man and wife, driving off to your reception with your new husband, cutting the cake, your First Dance...the list is endless.

But in this blog post I'm not going to talk about those sorts of "moments." What I want to talk about is "times"...as in the scheduled times of the various wedding day activities.

When planning your wedding, your entire day revolves around the fixing of two vitally important times:

• the time of your ceremony, and
• the time of your meal

These two times are difficult to move once set and determine the scheduling of the rest of your day. It is these two times that your wedding professionals will be interested in knowing. 

An early ceremony means that you can have a nice long wedding day with potentially a more relaxed schedule. Sadly it probably means you have to get up at stupid-o'clock.

It is usual to book the ceremony first. If you are lucky you also have some choice over its time. It is very important that you're not late to your ceremony because it can mean that you won't get married if your officiator has to go to another wedding on the same day. Obviously there is quite a lot of flexibility  in this most of the time but we have known a bride to be an hour late and it was looking touch and go for a while there.

When it comes to setting the meal time, make sure you've allowed enough time for the things you might want to do between the end of your ceremony and sitting down for your meal.

These can include:

• Enjoying time with your guests who will want to congratulate you
• Group photographs
• Confetti throwing
• Travelling to your Reception venue
• Wedding car photographs
• Portrait photographs
• Drinks at the Reception venue
• Receiving line

Also please don't forget to consider that the time your Reception venue may give you for your meal, may imply that they actually want the guests sat down as much as 15 minutes before that. It's well worth checking with them before hand.

So there you are, in summary:

1. Decide the sorts of things you want to do on your wedding day
2. Book your ceremony
3. Take advice from your wedding venue and photographer and wedding car professionals as to what would be the ideal sit-down time for your meal
4. Plan the rest of your wedding around these two times

Enjoy

by Steve Dunster