Wedding without essentials

I agree with everything Christiana said

Just be clear on what the plan is so that expectations are set accordingly and guests will understand what type of an experience you're providing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing things out of the ordinary. Just be transparent so that there's no disappointment.

I think that if you don't want a dinner and a dance, go for it. It's your day and you can have whatever kind of wedding you want! But I would state in your invite to your guests that you're not having a dinner, that way your guests aren't caught off guard in the evening when they find out there isn't a dinner

We're planning on not doing a full meal. We're just doing a meal with parents, siblings and wedding party during cocktail hour.

We're definitely not doing bouquet toss or garter toss or cake cutting, may not even do a cake we hired his cousin who is a professional pastry chef but haven't discussed what we want yet.

View quoted message Firstly, congratulations on the wedding! How lovely to have a quiet wedding with close family.


I’m glad to see that going for an untraditional route is not all that unusual. I am more confident in just having wedding cake and coffee as an option now. Thanks for your input!

View quoted message Thanks for replying and going about a similar way that I imaging we will also choose. I love the idea of coffee/tea/chai and wedding cake for a reception. Also, thank you for the invitation advice if we decided to not have a traditional reception.

I agree with everything Christiana said. We had our postponed wedding this past June with just 12 guests so we didn't do a lot of the traditional things like bouquet toss, garter toss, parent dances, speeches, etc. We probably wouldn't have done any of that even if we had had a "normal" wedding reception as none of those things were particularly important to us. We did do a sit down dinner though because it was just us and really close family, so it was almost like a normal family meal. But if you want to forgo the meal then definitely clearly state that on your invitations and try to plan the timing around meals too if possible so that your guests aren't starving if they're basically missing a meal.

I will say though if you invite guests to a reception with no food or a typical part removed from the night, just be sure to make that clear on the invitation so people know what they’re in for and can plan accordingly.

We postponed our reception so hadn’t fully decided but I 100% wanted to cut things from the reception. I had no interest in doing a first dance, no bouquet/garter toss, no parent/child dances. I was even against cake cutting but I think we compromised that we would do at least that haha.
Basically you can choose to do whatever you want for your reception. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks is right or normal. If you like certain traditions then keep them! If you don’t like them don’t do them! And if there are new traditions you want to make go for it!