Hi, I know this topic has come up a few times on here, but I didn't find anything that was exactly what is going on for my fiance and I. I would really appreciate thoughts and ideas from the board members here.
We were originally planning on having a small (immediate family only) ceremony on a Friday afternoon, followed by a dinner, and then having a larger reception the next day. The wedding is taking place in the city where most of my fiance's family and friends live, since I have a much smaller family. We are expecting about 80 people to come for the reception, about 20-25% of which will be out of town guests. It has been been pointed out to me, however, that some of the people who are travelling such a long way may be offended if they are not also invited to the ceremony. I didn't really understand this until reading more on the boards here.
My question is this: if I invite everyone to both the ceremony and the reception, can I still have them on separate days? It is important to me to have a smaller dinner with just our immediate families, because most of these people have never met and I want them to get to know each other a little bit. An alternative would be to have the small dinner on Friday night, and have the ceremony and reception the next day (this is basically the traditional route, right?), but I was hoping to have a little bit of down time between the ceremony and reception to not have such a crazy day. This was a no brainer when only a few people were coming to the ceremony, but now it has become more complicated.
Any thoughts?