In my previous post about wedding whens and wheres, I realize that I missed two parts. The time of day for our wedding and the place for our reception.
I don’t think determining the time of day for our wedding was particularly difficult for us. I grew up attending my aunts’ and uncles’ wedding (my mom was the second married of 12 children and I attended the weddings of at least 7 aunts and uncles during my childhood years)–and our family pattern was an early afternoon wedding with a reception immediately following in the church fellowship hall. Daytime weddings are traditional for our family.
Furthermore, as a college student and after, I’d attended many an evening wedding and mused at how worn out the bride and groom must be when they finally reach their honeymoon (or overnight) location. I was NOT eager to have my first night with my groom be one of exhausted irritability.
We chose a 1:30 wedding with a (short) reception immediately following.
Once we had our ceremony site in place, we had to choose a site for our wedding reception. We couldn’t have it in the church fellowship hall, since the hall can only comfortably seat maybe 80 people. Variable weather in Nebraska in March meant outdoors wasn’t an option–so we had to find ourselves a reception hall.
We had some definite constraints:
- The hall had to be available on March 9
- The hall had to seat at least two hundred people
- The hall had to have space for two hundred people to PARK (since our wedding was on the same day that Lincoln was hosting Nebraska’s Boys State basketball tournament)
- The hall had to let us self-cater or, at the very least, allow us to bring in an outside caterer (because I’m uber-cheap)
I did internet searches for places, called for availability, and was left with exactly two potential places–one of which seemed definitely the better pick.
Since I wasn’t in Lincoln, I phoned the hall to figure out logistics and then sent my mom down to scope out the hall and reserve it.
And that was that.
What: Wedding
When: 1:30 pm Saturday March 9, 2013
Where: Lincoln Christian Fellowship and Lincoln Meadows Social Hall
I made it down to Lincoln one weekend and my mom took me out to the place to peek in the windows–but otherwise, the first time I saw our reception location was when I arrived there to decorate the day before the wedding.
Despite all that, it turned out great. The only downside had nothing at all to do with the reception site and everything to do with my own lack of preparation.
I had mentioned the need for some sort of sound system in conversations with my folks but hadn’t followed up on it or made definite arrangements to have a microphone and speakers so our host could direct the reception activities more easily.
