Blessing at reception

I believe the blessing is the prayer that people say before their meal. We are asking my FH grandfather to do it or if he declines (he's not in super health) we will ask our groomsmen/ brother in law / minister to say it for us.

We had my step-dad do our blessing. We basically had him say his toast during this time, welcome everyone to the reception and then give a short prayer. His prayer was pretty general saying thank you for safe travels, blessing my DH and I and for families and friends.

What Sami said. It's the blessing on the meal. But he can ask for blessing on the couple and their life together too. But yeah, it's a prayer, not just a speech.

I did one at my friends wedding 3 years ago. I just did a prayer over the couple, the people there and the meal.

We are thinking of asking FH's sister to do this at our wedding (she has social anxiety, so would normally have been a BM), if she says she can't then perhaps one of FH's good friends.

Oh okay, thanks for the explanations! I'm feeling really dumb right now hahahaha!

I'll ask him if he'll feel comfortable doing that. Does it necessarily have to be someone who knows us really well? Or can I also ask the pastor who is doing our ceremony to give us the blessing (just in case our friend isn't comfortable with saying a prayer)?

My dad is a pastor so he did the blessing over our meal. He added in a very brief toast at the beginning, but it was really just a couple minutes and led very smoothly into the prayer (go dad!!!).

We had a second prayer later on by the ILs family priest.....he was running late so it was kind of weird as I think we already had food in front of us but it was meaningful to the family since we didn't have a Catholic wedding. He gave a really short toast too, but again it led really nicely into the prayer.

There are lots of pastors in my family so we probably could have had about 5 prayers but we thought that might be excessive. lol.