Weddingbee boards

As some of you may know, my fiance is Canadian.  (He's okay, for anyone who read my last post)  Anyway, we're in the final few weeks of his visa process, after which we will need to be legally married within three months.  This means, of course, we'll have to be legally married long before our wedding in May. 

At first I didn't want to do anything special for our civil ceremony.  I was afraid that it would make our wedding less special, so I wanted to treat it like nothing more than another round of paperwork for immigration.

MOH came to visit me this week, and we started to talk about what we were going to do for the civil ceremony.  She said she wanted to be there, even suggested becoming ordained to marry us.  Then, almost as a joke, I said we should have a Halloween party and throw a fun costume wedding at my house.

Then the more I thought about it, the more fun it sounded.  We have to make it legal first anyway, why not do something fun and off the wall?  FI and I could dress as a famous couple, we have my 100 year old country house as a venue.  Add good friends, costumes, good food and lots of alcohol and it'd be a great party!

We'd have two months to throw together an awesome halloween party.

What do you think?  Are any of you making it legal before your actual wedding?  Would you use the opportunity to throw a party, or would you treat it more like paperwork as I originally planned?