Weddingbee boards

8:00pm to start eating cocktails or dinner?  If you have cocktails (which have hors d'ouvres) by 7pm, then dinner at 8pm is totally fine.  I've had to wait til 8pm or later before eating anything at all at a wedding (since guests don't usually know the timeline) and I remember guests grumbling how they are starving. 

I think 8 p.m. is too late to start serving dinner.  Weddings have a tendency to run slightly off schedule, too, so if you're running 30 minutes late, people will be cranke!  It's better to err on the conservative side and start things earlier.

I'd suggest 5 p.m. ceremony, 6 p.m. cocktails, 7 p.m. dinner, knowing that you'll have a slight cushion in between all of those things

We did the best man toast, and our welcome right before dinner started for 15 minutes, so we didn't have to talk over people eating dinner (the clanking of silverware is tough to hold people's attention).

Then we allotted 30 minutes for dinner, as we knew our caterer was very well-staffed and would get the courses out to the table quickly.  People don't really eat that slowly normally, so 30 minutes was enough for us.

Then we lead into the mother/son, father/daughter dance thinking that if people were still eating, it was fine to do because there were no speeches.  Then we opened up for dancing, for the people who were done eating.

If you are sercing food during your cocktail hour starting at 7pm then a 8pm dinner is just fine.  It's really the first course and since peopel are eating later and later these days they probably wouldn't start at home until arouind 7 any way.  If you are worried about people needing a snack befor ethe ceremony you can include a timeline in the invites or welcome packages or you could include lemonade and cookies for guests as they arrive at the venue. It sounds like your gettine married somewhere other than a church so you could set up a table a bit away from the ceremony or outside the doors.