Unless you are loaded (or your family is loaded!), like most of us, you’ll need to pay attention to every dollar in your wedding budget. One of the best ways to cut costs is to put it all together in one shot – ceremony, photos, reception, all in one place. It keeps the toting people back and forth to almost non-existent, it makes it easy on your guests (no one gets lost on the way to the reception!), and if your DJ happens to be as cool as SkinnyBoy (!), it makes it easy to use the same set up for the ceremony as for the reception.
There’s quite a few pros other than the ones listed above, but let’s check out some of the cons for a second.
- Your guests may lump the entire event together in their mind and start to check out earlier than you would’ve liked (you really don’t want Aunt Ethel to miss the cake cutting do you?!?)
- You’ll have to really play with the downtime between the ceremony and the reception; too much and your guests will get bored; too little and you won’t have time for those high quality photo ops you and yours thought of in a wine-fueled stupor three weeks prior.
- Either your ceremony starts at a later time than the norm or your reception will be getting over much earlier than you may want.
The truth is, there’s really no right or wrong answer here; I’ve seen it done both ways. From a DJ’s perspective, if I’m doing both the ceremony and the reception, it’s definitely nice to have it all in one place; but I can also say the crowd tends to be a bit tougher in these scenarios. Take some time to figure out what YOU want because let’s be honest…the DJ’s opinion is pretty irrelevant here right? 😉