Okay ladies, I need some opinions.
Our ceremony and reception are
taking place in the same area, a large garden and lawn behind someone's
house. Because of this, I'm having a hard time figuring out the space
and how to transition from the ceremony to the reception. The space is
basically a large rectangle, with a small vintage looking cottage at the
top. The ceremony chairs will be in the middle, with our tables already
set up along both sides of the space. My issue is that once the
ceremony ends, the guests have no place to go but to their tables while
we remove the chairs from the ceremony. I'm worried about this getting
complicated or confusing, or being just plain tacky. (I saw an episode
of Four Weddings where the three ladies judging were heavily criticizing
this kind of thing, and now I'm all worried!).
My only other
thought was that instead of setting up the tables and ceremony chairs,
we could just set up the tables. That way when our guests come in for
the ceremony, they will just sit at their tables to watch the ceremony,
and we don't have to worry about that transition and removing the
chairs, and they'll already be seating when it comes time for the
reception to begin. This makes it pretty informal, but I'm okay with
that because the whole wedding will be rather informal anyway. What do
you think?