Need ideas to entertain our guests for our casual dinner reception!

Hi my name is lakeesha and I'm a event planner in Richmond,VA. Sounds like you need a little more help than what you are asking. email me @ ************@*********************.*** and I will give send you a format(free) of what you need to make your reception a more comfortable and fun event.

That's exactly what Im doing. Except I'm marrying in italy, and having the reception at our home. I doing the same things you are with the slide show and the ipod music. I haven't even thought of entertaining anymore. I think if you have music and food, and its not lasting that long then there wont be too much need for anymore entertainment. Especially if you make it known that it's a dinner reception, I don't think anyones expecting anymore than a few speeches, and a little mingling.

Why not enlist your family and friends to become part of the entertainment by asking various people from different phases of your lives to give speeches? You can record it easily and make it into a CD later, with snip-its of speeches in between songs. We did this and it was a great keepsake for our friends and family.

There is a great resource you can direct them to to help them find the right words to say about you. Please see below. I hope this helps!

An idea that came to my mind when I read your email.

You can burn a CD with a collection of you & your fiancee's favorite songs which could fill up some time.

Then, you could write up the story of your relationship and have someone read it aloud with songs blurbs that go along with the different stages to your relationship. I just worked at a wedding that had the story-aspect which took almost 40 minutes.

We had an instant camera and a photo book instead of a traditional guest book at our reception. Everyone had a lot of fun taking instant photos of each other and writing really great comments under thier picture in the book they went into. We got the camera, film and book online at Target. If this is strictly just a sit down dinner evening then I would agree with the other posters that your slide show and a few toasts are more than enough during dinner. If you want to put some interesting pary favors on the table, like Chinese finger locks or small trinkets in Chinese take-out boxes the guests will entertain themselves. You could also put out personalized fortune cookies with cute comments in them. That will keep the conversation flowing. Good luck and have fun!

Thanks for all your great ideas! I like the photo guest book idea. I think a slide show of our wedding, a few hours of music, and some entertaining favors should do the trick!