Working in our office, I get to meet with a lot of couples in the early stages of their wedding planning. More often than not they don’t even try to hide the fact that they are very unsure about certain aspects of the wedding and even clueless on some things! I always reassure them that there’s nothing wrong with that and they should be! I mean, more often than not you only plan a wedding once or maybe twice throughout your life. We are involved with the planning of hundreds of weddings each year! So I always encourage couples to ask us questions about anything, even things that have nothing to do with music or entertainment.

So this past week, one of the couples that had come in mentioned something very interesting to me. The bride had mentioned that her mom told them they absolutely should not go into their cocktail hour. I was taken aback for a split second but then remembered that weddings as we know them today are very different than 25-30 years ago and even very different than 25-30 months ago! Some of the traditional aspects of weddings from our parents’ generation are either fading away or are long gone! So for those keeping score at home, you should 100% go in to your cocktail hour, for 2 main reasons

  1. The food. More often than not cocktail hour food is better than the actual meal being served for dinner. Sure chateaubriand and chicken francese are great. But cocktail hours are a smorgasbord of finger foods and other less formal yet more appetizing food like sliders, fajitas, and make-your-own mac and cheese stations. You paid for it, you should get to enjoy it!
  2. To maximize your time. Including your cocktail hour your wedding is only 5 hours. Yes…ONLY. Sounds like a lot of time and if you were sitting through a dissertation on the process of paint drying I’m sure it would feel like even longer. But on your wedding day it flies by. On top of being pulled in a million different directions, there’s a reason they say “time flies when you’re having fun”. So on top of enjoying some awesome food, use your cocktail hour as time when you can say hi to as many guests as possible. For years, we would see couples going table to table to table to table…you get the idea…and it would literally take them more than half of their reception to greet everyone. So your 5 hour timeframe for fun has now been trimmed down to 1.5 to 2 hours! Weddings are a once in a lifetime experience (and expensive!) so while I 100% agree you should make time to say hello to everyone, you should also get to spend it the way you want. If that’s chatting with friends or catching up with relatives who travelled from far away, that’s awesome. But if you’re like me and my wife and want to dance dance dance, maximize those cocktail hour minutes.

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pin - Elite Entertainment Do you have to go table to table