what time should my wedding start

Are you wanting an early afternoon ceremony? Or a sunset ceremony? It's really up to your personal preference. If you want to sneak away with your photographer for sunset pictures, take that into consideration

Mine starts at two. It really just depends on what your schedule timeline looks like.

My girlfriend is super intro astrology, and she believes the time of the wedding has a big impact on the marriage, as the time dictates which astrological house the planets fall into. Where is your ceremony location? I can ask her to see what time would be best on your wedding date, which time is best aligned with the stars lol. Crazy, I know I know, but hey, no harm since you are pretty open about the time.

What kind of wedding are you having? Is it going to have a full meal or are you doing a cake and punch reception?

Mine starts at noon and that way dinner starts around 4

2:00 is when mine is. I fee like that's a good time.

Ours is a Saturday in May and the ceremony starts at 530.

Mine starts at 4 reception starts at 6

My will start at 2pm.

OHP - You don't want any gap between the ceremony and the reception. If the ceremony is at noon then the reception should be no later than 1:00pm. That's accounting for travel time (if there needs to be) and length of ceremony. Ideally, there should be a seamless transition from your ceremony to your cocktail hour to your reception.

Start by seeing if there are any time constraints at your venue(s). Our church wouldn't let us start any later than 2:00, so we started at 2:00 and adjusted the reception timeline accordingly.

We're pretty much having a sunset wedding (Saturday at 7:30pm). That was the time we could have it at our venue, which is fine with me.

It's usually warmer in the early afternoon, which you may want to take into account.

If you would like some pics while the sun is setting, you may want to have it a little later.

Honeybee - that sounds interesting! I hope we picked a good day and time for ours!

@Melissa...what I can tell you is that you literally picked the best day to get married between all days in 2016 and 2017. I remember when I got engaged, she kept telling me to pick NYE 2016 as my wedding date because it was the BEST day aligned with the stars!!! haha so it's sooo funny you happen to mention that! We needed to push our wedding back by a year though, so that date was out of the question for us. What time is your ceremony starting and how long will it go for? You definitely picked a great day, but I can check on time for you.

@OHP - Cocktail hour fills the gap, there should be no gap between ceremony and reception. The cocktail hour is the transition and considered part of the reception.

It is traditional to start the ceremony on the half hour.

The latest our church would do our ceremony is 3 so we are doing it then and we will have our cocktail hour/reception start at 5 since there will be shuttles taking people to the reception location that is 15 minutes away

If we had ceremony and reception at the same place, the reception would start right after the ceremony finished so we would pick 4:30 for the ceremony and 5-5:15 for reception