This is my second time on this board, and while I looked at other responses about wedding day timelines w/full catholic wedding masses, I don't know if any or all of the advice given would be applied to my crazy large gap.
Here's some back story - Originally, our church had said no to marrying us as we are getting married during lent. They said that they can't marry anyone during lent. So, with being told no and after trying to reach out to a Priest friend of the family with no response after a week, we went to our reception location and booked our ceremony before the reception. We spoke with our Priest friend the same day we booked our ceremony at our reception location and he said that there are no laws about not being able to get married during lent. It's each churches decision on whether or not they want to have a wedding in their church. Understandable. About 3 days after we booked our ceremony, our church called and said that after further review and discussion they have decided that they would be able to marry us and it was wrong of them to say no in the first place. Being that FI and I both wanted a church wedding, we cancelled our ceremony at our reception location and booked with our church.
We have a 1pm full catholic mass (and we all know that weddings never really start on time...so benefit of the doubt 1:15) and our cocktail hour doesn't start until 6pm. We tried to move our cocktail hour up to 5pm, but there is a wedding reception that ends at 5pm and they need time to clean up, etc. So, we have to keep our cocktail hour at 6. That means that there is an extremely large gap between wedding ceremony and reception. The way I look at it, we won't be done with mass until about 2/215pm, receiving line at the church ends at like 2:30 and then we have pictures to be taken at the church, the bridal party (and any family members/guests that stay behind) we won't be leaving until 3pm (unless there is a wedding directly after ours). The drive to the reception venue is about 30-40 minutes or so depending on traffic. On a Saturday afternoon, it can be touchy - so if there is very little to no traffic the drive is 30 minutes. Anyhow...that means that our guests will be there around 4pm-ish. If they booked a room for the night, they could check in, etc but what are they going to do for the extra 2 hours?I have put a call into our church to see if we could do a 2pm mass, but since it is during lent, I'm not sure if they'll want a later mass, not to mention there is a 4:30pm mass on Saturdays. So, either way I look at it we could be stuck with a 1pm ceremony. Which isn't super horrible, but the gap is what is killing me.
It doesn't help that FI's mother is on my case about the ceremony and reception gap, but I can't please everyone. My mom said it should be OK where as my father is just like "whatever." I can't help but feel like I'm going to disappoint our guests in some way with such a large gap.....
Any advice?