Hello everyone,
My fiancé (French) and I (American) were planning on getting married in France, where we currently live, this June. However, with COVID-19, our plans have changed. We have been engaged and planning this event for over 2 years - we would have gotten married last summer, but my sister and her husband were already planning on getting married September 2019, so to ease things for my mother and my family, we decided to wait until summer 2020.
*Quick side note: In France, the weddings are split between civil and religious ceremonies. So EVERYONE gets married at the town hall, and if there are couples who would like to get married in a church or temple, they do so after the civil ceremony. It's an administrative requirement that the marriage licenses do not leave the town hall, hence why things are done this way in France.*
This situation right now is that we can still have our civil marriage at the town hall in June. Since things are gradually opening up here in France, we are also going to be hosting a little garden party (with all health and safety measures) with my fiancé's clostest family and friends.
As for my family, we were planning on organizing the religious ceremony and the wedding celebration in the United States. We were already planning on going to my maternal grandparents' with my whole family for Christmas (a long-time tradition), so we decided that organizing something a week before Christmas would enable us to celebrate our wedding with all of the family that will already be there because the already live there or that they will be visiting for the Christmas festivities. We have already hired a wedding planner, reserved the church and the venue, and asked for and had vacation accepted from our employers.
A week ago my sister (my only sibling and matron of honor) announced that she and her husband are pregnant with their first, which has made me completely indecisive about what to do. She is due the week of our wedding, and she lives 2,000 miles away from where my maternal grandparents and family lives. She said that she would come and organize to have her delivery in a local hospital, but I don't think that is a very good idea because travelling while pregnant is difficult, and in some cases, impossible. Then the stress of the wedding and being surrounded by family probably will make matters all the more uncomfortable for her.
But it also makes me feel so defeated. We were planning and replanning and trying to get things together so that the most people will be able to come. My fiancé and I yearn just to have a celebration with my family and move on to the next step. And since we live in France, we don't have a lot of flexibility to be able to come and go for a weekend, it's planning a 3-week block to make the time spent and the plane ticket count (plus more if quarantines for international travel are enforced, which we already took into account for our Christmas plans).
My fiancé is also in the middle of immigration process so that he can come live in the United States, and it will likely be next summer that his paperwork will go through and he will likely be called upon to go to the US Embassy in Paris to have his interview and medical exam. Nothing is clear in this aspect either. Christmas is the only solid time where we know that we are free to come to the US at this moment.
What do you all think? Should I postpone the family celebration? Would having a celebration more than a year after the civil ceremony be awkward? Will it be old news and people won't think that it's important anymore? Would it be justifiable to continue having our wedding at Christmas even though my sister will likely not be able to attend? We have a very good relationship and I know that she'd understand as much as I understand her situation. At what point can we make plans for ourselves and not plan our lives around other people? Even asking that question makes me feel despicable.
Thank you for reading this, I know it's kind of a mess,