Toast to guests

Also, anyone already married, did you wish you did something differently with your toast etc.?

Fun! My FIL has tons of experience with this sort of thing so we let him represent us with a welcome toast/blessing. It was a wonderful mix of serious/funny/sentimental/inside jokes ending with a beautiful prayer. I wouldn’t have done anything differently!

View Quoted Comment Ouu OK, see I am so glad I did this post because I wasn’t even thinking about doing the toast before dinner! That makes a heck of a lot of sense actually haha. Right now with the timing that we have, we snuck it in at the end of dinner, right before dessert… But now that I think about it, that doesn’t really make as much sense as it would to do it before dinner because right before dinner after cocktail hour it’s basically the first point in time that all of our guests will be seated so we can “start” so to speak, the hosting and addressing our guests.....If any of that makes any sense LOL

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Haha yes this makes sense! I would 100% do it pre-dinner when you know all of your guests are there and haven't bled off yet!

What exactly is this? Is it like a thank you for coming type thing? Never seen or heard of these before so am curious.

View Quoted Comment Yeah, like to address everyone and thank them for coming out type deal

View Quoted Comment I was wondering the same lol. Is it regional? Or just at really big weddings? The weddings I’ve gone to the bride & groom go around individually to thank everyone.

View Quoted Comment I don’t think it’s regional, But we plan on making our “Rounds” so to speak during cocktail hour and our day of coordinator will go around to make sure that everyone is OK with everything during dinner. But it’s basically a toast to thank everyone for coming out, many people give a special thanks to the bridal party, parents and thank their vendors and everyone they put work into the day. It’s typically not too long or anything like that, but YouTube has a bunch of videos

View Quoted Comment Interesting. You learn something new every day lol. I’ll have to ask my planner if that’s something she’s used to brides doing especially since we don’t plan on having other speeches.

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Excellent question. I've been to big and small weddings and the ones I have attended, the couple greets everyone after the ceremony either in a receiving line (without parents) or dismissing the rows which both go super quick. Also there's no separate guests at the reception if that makes a difference. We aren't having any toasts from attendants or guests, so hopefully that won't give anyone an idea that they can share their own.

Alot of things boil down to what is common within your family and social circle vs someone else's.

We did it at the start of dinner as well. We honestly just winged it. We thanked everyone for coming and thanked our parents and wedding party specifically. We kept it very brief, like maybe a minute or 2. We did go around to tables as well, but we just mostly wanted to publicly thank everyone for the role (big or small) they played in getting us to that point and their overall and support over the years.

Since we're still quite a ways off, we aren't anywhere near starting to actually write our toast, I just know I want to do one, and I have some ideas:
1. Thank guests for supporting our marriage all these years.
2. Briefly thank each group (thinking a mix of sentimental/funny, like thanking my mom for helping us get through when both of us lost our jobs at the same time, thanking his "classic car buddies" for occupying our garage every Saturday, my best friends for third-wheeling without complaint, etc.)
3. A reflection together about our marriage.
4. Maybe some kind of nice little quote to conclude. There's a quote about marriage from Star Trek (our favorite TV franchise) that I really like, that I don't think will fit anywhere in the ceremony, but I'd like to have it somewhere, and I think this would be a good place for it.
I am definitely setting a time limit - after sitting behind a camera for hundreds of wedding speeches, I know that no matter how sweet or sentimental or entertaining a speech is, there is absolutely a limit on attention span. My personal opinion is ~2 minutes is the max anyone wants to listen to a single person talking, so together we're looking at about 3-4 minutes. Ideally I'd prefer about 3 minutes between us.
Since we aren't doing a traditional plated or buffet meal, but action stations that people can go to freely, I think we're going to do it shortly after everyone gets into the reception area. I feel like due to the way the meal is arranged it will be hard to reel everyone back together once they start eating, so it needs to be done before.

My husband gave our toast and he actually just winged it the day of. I kept asking him if he was preparing anything and he said he was thinking about things but never actually wrote anything. It helps that he is a performer, drummer/singer, so the toast ended up being great. He made people laugh, he made people awww. But yeah he didn’t prepare anything.

View Quoted Comment We had a very small wedding and we still did a thank you toast for our guests (with non-alcoholic sparkling).