Page 53 - FDCC Pandemic Book

Living in a Pandemic: A Collection of Stories on Coping, Resilience & Hope
urging all public gatherings be cancelled until March 31, 2020.
What? What about a wedding with 350+ people on April 4, 2020?
We immediately contacted our
wedding planner and began
putting together a “Plan B.” If this
pandemic carries over into April,
we need to examine a possible
rescheduling date in May. We
checked with the key vendors and selected a weekend in May as Plan B. Within two days, we had a rescheduled wedding date of May 9, 2020, if need be. Surely, we thought, everything would calm down by May. Two weeks later, we realized May 9 might be too soon, so we picked a third date of May 29, 2020. A month later, reality set in and we began to realize the situation was much worse than originally thought, so we selected a fourth day during the summer months, July 11, 2020.
Planning a first wedding in normal times can be fun, but also extremely stressful, particularly for the Bride, Mother-of-the-Bride, and Mother-of-the-Groom. Having to reschedule four times does not even register on the “stress gauge.” Not only did we not know when it would be safe to hold a wedding, but we had 25 vendors that we needed to schedule for the eventual wedding day. We need to invent a new word to measure that level of stress and anxiety!
Now that we had a little more time to think rationally, the two families met at our house on May 15 for dinner to discuss a realistic wedding day. At dinner, we would make a final decision on the wedding date. Someone raised the issue that July 11 in Columbia was mighty hot. Should we push it out further into the fall when the weather would be more friendly? We put it to a vote. A new date was selected – October 10, 2020. And this new date was selected with a “come hell or high water” amendment.
Back to the drawing board to re-book all the vendors. As it turned out, almost all the vendors were available because everyone else was postponing their Fall weddings. Only one vendor refused to cooperate – the downtown mansion reception venue. The owners advised us they were not re-booking any events “for the foreseeable future.” Basically, they said their venue would not be available. We had to find a new reception venue.
Within a couple of weeks, we found a new reception venue. An old horse farm with a nice mansion at the end of the farm with large open grounds in the front and backyard. The only downside was the venue was about ten miles outside of Columbia and our church. Since our church was also still closed, we decided to move the
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