What did you do Dj-wise and through dinner for your cocktail hour?

View quoted message Ours is 30 min away! You are more on top of his then i am

View quoted message Yeah I think I'm going to need to as well for the same reason. It's not like they can just pop out and run to the local McDs, because it's 20 minutes away on the highway lol.

We will have the bluetooth speaker from our venue playing spotify pop instrumentals. We are debating on games and snacks as our wedding is at 1pm in the middle of no where

View quoted message It'll likely be more like "cocktail two hours" since there really isn't much around (rural venue and everything - including accommodations for FH and I - is onsite). Everyone is basically going to show up for the ceremony and unless they feel like driving 15+ minutes into town they'll be onsite in between as well. That's why I might use some of that time to have fun games and stuff, since asking people to just mingle for 2 hours straight is a bit much IMO. The venue has a nice area where they recommend putting out some lawn games which I might do (I'll see how many I can DIY) and we might do the shoe game at that point and stuff. I'm hoping that we can transition right into dinner, then speeches, then the first dance, then dancing for everyone by 6:30 or 7 since we only have until 12 ish. I'm going to ask everyone to keep their speeches to only a few minutes if possible (mostly because no one aside from those involved really cares about most of the stories anyway).


Anyway, yeah, I'll see if the venue will let me just plug in my laptop or whatever.

Def have some music for sure. i would just plug in a phone if its just an hour you can make a play list and thats it

So our 8 hour package from the DJ just included the cocktail hour up until we ended for the night. So he played all the music during the cocktail hour based off our likes, and then had soft dinner music, acoustic songs etc. We actually had to pay extra for his ceremony set up but that was separate from the initial package.

You could do a laptop play list for cocktail hour and dinner just to make it easy for everyone!

I would go with the laptop/phone playlist option if it's possible to get it hooked up. We didn't have a cocktail hour or anything but we did have music playing quietly while guests found a seat and got a drink while we signed the papers in a separate building. You don't think it would be that bad without it but what if it is - right? lol

Since you won't have many people dancing at that point I don't think you really need the DJ. I would go with the laptop if possible. I personally am not musically inclined so I would pay the extra to have DJ early.