unusual reception plan - will this be okay?

amphora29a

Hi,

My fiance and I are getting married on a special date - Leap Day, February 29th.  The day of the week happens to be a Monday.  Since it's a weekday, we figure most people won't attend the ceremony, so having the reception a different day would be better. Ideally, the reception would be on a weekend when it'll be convenient for people to travel & all that.

Since the wedding day is the last day of the month, if we do the reception the weekend after the ceremony, it will be in a different month, and I worry that people will always get our anniversary date wrong, unless the entire theme of the reception is Leap Day and we just hit them over the head with that date.

I'd much rather have the reception before the wedding, on a date that is in the same month as the wedding date, than 5 days after it.  We could even do it Sunday so we just have it just one day before the wedding.

But I know people would think it's just plain weird to have a traditional reception before the wedding ceremony.  A lot of the stuff you'd normally do at a reception you can't do because you aren't married yet.  You can't have the "I now present to you for the first time anywhere Mr and Mrs...", and I'm sure a bunch of other things would change too.

Also, because the wedding is at a time when many of the people who are invited would not attend, it makes me worry we'll run into etiquette issues with having people attend the reception who don't attend the wedding. I gather you can't exactly have 100 people at a ceremony in a courthouse. Should we just only invite people to the reception?  

I will note that my fiance and I don't care *too* much about shocking people, but I don't want to catch grief from my family for having broken rules. They have no means of making my life difficult other than just annoying me - we're paying for the wedding, not them.

What do you think? Should I even worry that people won't remember the actual wedding date? Would having the reception in advance be appalling? Would inviting people only to the reception be a terrible thing to do?