Here's the deal everyone,
My fiance, Zach, is in the Navy. He's still in training in Great Lakes, Illinois. We got engaged during the winter holiday season and are in a hurry to get married so I can go with him to his new basing assignment in April. Therefore, we decided that when he gets his leave time inbetween training and this first base we would do a courthouse marriage to make us a legal married couple to make it okay according to the military standards to go with him. We also decided to have a reception at a later date (in a year or so) for our families and friends to gather and help us celebrate our marriage.
The problems we are having are with the way are announcements should be written, wether we should include a list of places we are registered at with these announcements and when they should be sent out. From the information I have gathered announcements are to be sent out after the courthouse ceremony; however we would like to let people have the choose to make the trip to Florida (where we are having the courthouse marriage because that is where I'm living and all of our family is either in Wisconsin or Illinois) to attend if they want to. Also, if people are sending gifts we would want them to be able to send them to us and not the parents but we wouldn't have a set address until MONTHS after the courthouse ordeal.
To sum it all up,
should the announcements be sent after the ceremony?
should we be registering places and making that known within the envelope of the announcement?
How to we word an announcement like this if we were to want people to be welcome to join us for the courthouse marriage?
Really, any kind of information of advice on this kind of arrangement would be helpful!!
Thank you so much
Nikki