Hi ladies, I posted something about this on E several months ago, but it would probably be better to bring it up here. I'm extremely conflicted.
FI and I are both Catholic. We will be having a mass in my home parish, in my hometown. My church does weddings at 2 pm, so that's when ours is going to be. With a mass, it will end at around 3 pm.
Right now, our reception is set to start at 5 pm, but our venue and band is pretty flexible so things could be changed if necessary. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the "catholic gap" which is that often-complained-of break between the ceremony and reception for catholic weddings.
Thing is, if our guests went immediately over to the reception that would put dinner around 4 pm, at the latest... and that's if we stretched a cocktail hour for an entire hour, which I know I always dislike as a guest.
We have a lot of out-of-towners coming, but our reception is at another site. The only two ideas we've been able to come up with is to either just have people eat awkardly early by immediately going over to the reception venue or else setting up a little meet and greet with some light snacks in the parish hall. The major problem with that is that my parents are paying for a full-on reception, and I know that they wouldn't care to feed people a lot of food twice in one afternoon. Even if the snacks were very light, It's also still a 2 hour gap.
Any thoughts? What did you do?
Thanks so much ladies!