Wedding what kind of time line for an evening wedding?

[RLG]

Today was the day you can book our school''s church and although I got the date I wanted, the 2pm wedding slot was already taken. The wedding will start at 7pm. For those of you who have had evening weddings would you mind sharing your wedding time line, what you did for the reception food, and if you had any problems with a night wedding? My other option is a 2pm wedding at a different church that is farther away from the reception site.

 

[musey]

Well, our venue is kinda everything-rolled-in-together (ceremony site, reception site, food, bar, etc. etc.). It's sort of a "backyard" setup, with the cermony area in the "yard," dinner on the "deck" and dancing inside the "house." I'll give you our tentative timeline anyway... Hope it helps!!

6:00 - Official 'start time'

6:10 - Ceremony begins

6:25 - Ceremony ends, cocktail hour immediately follows inside the house (DJ begins playing at this time)

7:30 - Dinner begins

8:15 - Dancing begins

11:00 - Reception ends

 

[SarahLovesJS]

I don''t have an official timeline yet, but I believe I will be doing something similar to musey. The ceremony HAS to start at 6 and then the reception will begin around 6:30. It will end around 10 or 11 depending on whether we add the extra hour. So I just wanted to second musey basically.

 

[Courtneylub]

My ceremony starts late at 7:30 and this is the tentative schedule:

7:15 - Guests start arriving
7:30 - Ceremony starts
7:45 - Reception - straight into first dance
8:00 - Dinner
8:30 - Dancing
9:00 - Toast
9:30 - Cake cutting
10:00 - Anniversary Dance
11:30-12 - Reception Ends

 

[Cleopatra]

Courtney - Question for ya

What''s an Anniversary Dance? I''ve never heard of that!

 

[Courtneylub]

Instead of the typical bouquet and garter toss, we''re doing the anniversary dance where all couples join on the dance floor. The DJ says "If you''ve been married for longer than 1 year, continue dancing." This goes to 5, then 10, etc. The last couple standing will be my grandparents who''ve been married for 52 years. I think it''s really sweet.

 

[mjso]

my wedding is an evening event as well. The official timeline given by the venue is:

6:00 - 7:00 Ceremony
7:00 - 8:00 Cocktail Hour
8:00 - 12:00 Dinner and Dancing

But I highly doubt we are going to have an hour long ceremony so we talked about it and the coordinator said we can play things by ear and start the cocktail hour as soon as the ceremony is over, so I''m guessing it may be more like:

6:00 - 6:30 Ceremony
6:30 - 7:30 Cocktail Hour
7:30 - go upstairs to start the reception

Yesterday was our negative 1 year anniversary (1 year to the date of our wedding)...so FI and I were talking about it and at midnight EST I was like "oooh, one year from today we''ll be going back to the hotel to go to sleep" and he said "no, we''ll be going out to celebrate" so I guess I have to add in "after party" to the timeline!

 

[musey]

Date: 5/2/2008 9:59:09 AM
Author: Courtneylub
7:30 - Ceremony starts
7:45 - Reception - straight into first dance

Courtney, are you doing pics before the ceremony, none after?

It does seem like that works so much better, timeline-wise... and I guess with an evening wedding it may be kind of necessary in order to still have light (<--definitely had NOT thought of this until just now! eta: CRAP the sun sets at 6:33 on our date this year, that will for sure complicate pictures)

 

[Courtneylub]

Date: 5/2/2008 11:33:18 AM
Author: musey

Date: 5/2/2008 9:59:09 AM
Author: Courtneylub
7:30 - Ceremony starts
7:45 - Reception - straight into first dance

Courtney, are you doing pics before the ceremony, none after?

It does seem like that works so much better, timeline-wise... and I guess with an evening wedding it may be kind of necessary in order to still have light (<--definitely had NOT thought of this until just now! eta: CRAP the sun sets at 6:33 on our date this year, that will for sure complicate pictures)

I''m still confused as to how I want to do this actually. At first I thought we could take pics before the ceremony and get a shot of us seeing each other for the first time. Then I decided I liked the dramatic effect of me walking down the aisle and seeing his face, etc. We don''t have a wedding party, so I don''t think pictures will take long at all. I will tell the photgrapher that I don''t want it taking longer than 15 minutes.

The sun sets at 8:15 in July here, so the ceremony will be right at dusk.

 

[ringster]

our evening wedding will look like this --

5:15-5:30 - FI and i see each other for first time

5:30-6:30 - formal pics and pictures with family

6:30-7:30 - cocktail hour (we will be there to greet guests and spend some time with them and get pics with them if they want)

7:30-7:50ish - ceremony

then the order of things is a bit tentative in terms of toasts (one from groom family, one from bride family and our thank you to everyone), the first dance and father/daughter dance but the general times are :

8:00 dinner starts (after main course is served, the floor will be open for anyone to give informal toast)

9:30 or 10 for cake cutting
then we have the place until 11:30pm

we are not doing a bouquet toss or garter toss - they are personally not something i enjoyed about weddings

 

[havernell]

This isn’t exactly answering RLG’s question about evening weddings, but I wanted to share nonetheless. These are some tips/advice that I’ve heard from various people in terms of planning the wedding day timeline that may be good to consider:

- Keep in mind that moving groups of people take time, often much longer than you''d think it would take. Even if your ceremony and reception are in the same place, it will take a while for everyone to file out of their pews and walk to the cocktail hour. Older folks may need help moving, people will stop to talk to each other, etc... so build in more time for "people moving" than you think you need.

- Are any of you planning on doing receiving lines? No one has mentioned that in their time lines yet. Even if you don''t want to do one, know that one may spontaneously start. This happened at my friend''s wedding- people just started lining up next to the couple outside of their cocktail hour location (and at that point, you kind of just have to go with it. I mean are you going to tell your guest "no you can''t greet us"?) So, you may want to think about building in time for that.

- Just like moving a group takes longer than you may think, feeding a group also does. Someone above had only 30 minutes allotted for dinner in their timeline which may not be enough. If you are having a plated meal, not everyone is going to get served at the exact same time. Also, around dinner is where people usually do toasts and stuff, so you may want to leave a few minutes for that as well.

Overall, it just seems like you should leave more time for everything than you think you need. That way, if things run early it’s not problem (more time for dancing!) which is better than the alternative of everything running late and you getting stressed out about it.

I''m hoping some already-marrieds will chime in to say how their timeline stacked up against how things really went on their wedding day! That would be helpful.

 

[AceP]

already married, at your service. our ceremony and reception were on the same site. our plan was:

photos begin: 4:30
document signing: 5:30
ceremony begins: 6:00
cocktail hour: 6:30
reception begins with first dance, followed by father/daughter, mother/son, hora: 7:30
dinner served: 8ish (toasts during salad course)
cake cutting: 9ish
photographer leaves: 9:30 (this is important to keep in mind if there are certain photo ops that are important to you, e.g. cake cutting)
reception ends: 11:30

in reality, the ceremony definitely started 10 or 15 minutes late, and cocktail hour started a bit late. after that, i pretty much stopped paying attention. i would guess we cut the cake maybe around 9:30? i''m honestly not sure. i don''t really think anything was on schedule, but really, who cares? the evening flowed, the dance floor was packed, and that''s what really matters. so i really wouldn''t sweat this too much, other than having a rough outline of what order you''d like things to happen, so that whoever is directing the show knows what to do when. hope that helps.

 

[SarahLovesJS]

Date: 5/2/2008 10:42:53 AM
Author: Courtneylub
Instead of the typical bouquet and garter toss, we''re doing the anniversary dance where all couples join on the dance floor. The DJ says ''If you''ve been married for longer than 1 year, continue dancing.'' This goes to 5, then 10, etc. The last couple standing will be my grandparents who''ve been married for 52 years. I think it''s really sweet.

I love that!

 

[Courtneylub]

Date: 5/2/2008 2:40:55 PM
Author: havernell
This isn’t exactly answering RLG’s question about evening weddings, but I wanted to share nonetheless. These are some tips/advice that I’ve heard from various people in terms of planning the wedding day timeline that may be good to consider:

- Keep in mind that moving groups of people take time, often much longer than you''d think it would take. Even if your ceremony and reception are in the same place, it will take a while for everyone to file out of their pews and walk to the cocktail hour. Older folks may need help moving, people will stop to talk to each other, etc... so build in more time for ''people moving'' than you think you need.

- Are any of you planning on doing receiving lines? No one has mentioned that in their time lines yet. Even if you don''t want to do one, know that one may spontaneously start. This happened at my friend''s wedding- people just started lining up next to the couple outside of their cocktail hour location (and at that point, you kind of just have to go with it. I mean are you going to tell your guest ''no you can''t greet us''?) So, you may want to think about building in time for that.

- Just like moving a group takes longer than you may think, feeding a group also does. Someone above had only 30 minutes allotted for dinner in their timeline which may not be enough. If you are having a plated meal, not everyone is going to get served at the exact same time. Also, around dinner is where people usually do toasts and stuff, so you may want to leave a few minutes for that as well.

Overall, it just seems like you should leave more time for everything than you think you need. That way, if things run early it’s not problem (more time for dancing!) which is better than the alternative of everything running late and you getting stressed out about it.

I''m hoping some already-marrieds will chime in to say how their timeline stacked up against how things really went on their wedding day! That would be helpful.

I''ve been married before so I know things get behind sometimes. This is a tentative thing and knowing my family and friends, there will some dancing if some guests take too long eating dinner. I could maybe do the toast at the 30 minute mark of dinner, that way we everyone can finish eating during the speeches.

Very true about moving the group. That should be a good time to snap some picture of the 2 of us with our families.

 

[RLG]

Thanks for all of the responses. I''m guess ours will go something like this:
afternoon: pictures and feed the wedding party and parents.
ceremony at 7pm-8pm ? just guessing at the time but I doubt would be that long
8:30 guest arrive at reception which is driving distance about 5-10 minutes away
9pm bridal party arrives at reception, cake cutting toasts etc.
8:30-10 first round of cocktails out, dancing starting after cake cutting
10:30 to 12 second round of cocktails out
12:30-12:45 end of evening? It sounds like a really late night but most of our guest would be in their 20''s and during a random polling at school yesterday seemed to like the late night event. I dont think there will be too many elderly guests aside from grandparents.
what do you all think?