"dummy" ceremony at the reception

Dummy ceremony would save time if you can have a projector set up for the guest to see the wedding from a cell phone connected to the machine.

If it's necessary to go to the office for your official marriage license, then it is totally fine to have a "dummy" ceremony. Just try not to publicize that it's not the real one!

My cousin got "married" in Mexico... but they didn't want to do the necessary blood work & being in the country for 4 business days prior to the wedding... so they had a full ceremony and reception, but they signed a fake "license" at the "ceremony". They tried not to tell people it wasn't real, because they got married at home with their family about a week after they got home.

If you are able to get an officiant to your venue, you could just have it all for real in one place.

If you're open to having a friend or family member perform a small ceremony after the legal one, I think this would be lovely and a bit fun to get "married" twice in one day. If you're getting married at city hall early in the morning, you could leave, go get pictures taken, and then go to your venue and start your other marriage ceremony followed by your reception. Time will be tight, so you'll want to make a timeline for yourself.

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Is there any way that you could have a family member or close friend go online and get ordained? That would be less expensive and will allow you to get married in front of everyone that you want there

View quoted message The price for hiring the officiant in our country both outside of working hours and in a different area than the office itself is unfortunately very expensive. We already had to drop many other aspects (for instance honeymoon, hotel room for the night), due to budgeting limits we have. Me and my fiance throw the reception fully on our own budget.

Why not just hire an officiant to come to your venue and do the actual ceremony there?