Making Your Party Worry Free!
These are some suggestions to make your wedding reception worry free!
With wedding planning comes much worry and stress, we want to help you plan your reception with as little worry and stress as possible. These "pointers" can help ensure that.
After being in the banquet industry for more than 14 years and having performed at almost 1000 receptions I have learned a great deal about having a stress free wedding, plus being married myself I have been in your "shoes". I am not going to kid you and say that this won't be a crazy and busy night because that is exactly what it will be. How you prepare for it though can help you have the most stress free and wonderfully fun filled evening that you could ever imagine. The biggest and best pointer that I can give would be this, relax, take a deep breath, and try to cherrish every moment or your wedding day, if something happens or does not go as planned try to smile and keep yourself calm. Another "pointer" that I have would be to stay away from "timing" out your evening. Once you start trying to follow a "written schedule" you can really add a whole lot of uneeded and unwanted stress. Just let the events of the evening flow naturally, remember you are working with people who are professional and do this on a regular basis.
1. Pictures.
Get as mant pictures as you can after the ceremony has taken place. This would include all bridal party and family photos. This way when you arrive at the hall you can have some time to relax before dinner starts and greet some of your guests. After dinner is over (the bridal party is usually the first to be served and is always the first done eating) finish up any pictures that need to be taken at the hall.
2. Receiving line.
To make things easier for the bride and groom and family have your receiving line at the church or where ever you have your ceremony at. This also helps utilize valuable time.
3. Greeting guests at the reception.
As soon as dinner is over and the last group or individual photos are taken, use this time to stop and visit each table, all guests usually do not get to attend the ceremony so you can use this time to greet and visit any who did not make it to the ceremony, about 2 minutes at each table would be proper.
4. Cutting the cake.
After you are done greeting all of your guests tables would be a good time to cut the cake, this way the hall can get it prepared to serve or just get it wrapped for guests to take home.
5. The bridal dances.
After you have cut the cake and have visited with your guests and have got most of the pictures out of the way would be a great time to get the dancing portion of the evening started. By tradition the bride and groom should always have the first dance of the night (the bridal dance) before any of the guests are "allowed" to dance. What we recommend is doing the bridal dance first, followed by the bridal party dance, then do the father daughter dance, and then follow that up with the mother son dance. This way the photographer can get all the pictures he needs at once. Then we like to start up the dancing, and after about 45 minutes we like to do the bouquet and garter, followed by the dollar dance. This makes things much nicer for the bride and groom because they get all the activities done in 2 easy segments, and believe us when we say your photographer will thank you because it makes his job easier, because he does not have to keep coming back and forth to the dance floor.
6. HAVE FUN! HAVE FUN! HAVE FUN!
After reading this I am sure you are probably wondering how you could possibly have fun, but I tell you this, your head is gonna be spinning all night, your gonna be tired, and for the most part the evening is gonna go by so fast your gonna sit and wonder where all the time went. So with that in mind, every now and again, stop and look around, take the time to look at your cake, watch your guests enjoy themselves, smell all the flowers, and most of all look deep into the eyes of your spouse and remember everything that it took to get you where you are at that particular moment and think to yourselves that you would not have done things any other way and cherrish every moment of YOUR SPECIAL DAY!
