Demetrios Gown via Mon Amie Bridal

Wedding Bells Are Ringing (or at least they will in 2022 for us)  👰🏼

It took me a while to finally sit and write this post as every time I start thinking about my dream wedding, I get a little emotional. ICYMI – we got engaged in February 2020 right before COVID hit the US and while our engagement and proposal was something out of a fairytale…the events that followed were anything but. We had such a magical time at Disney Aulani getting engaged on the beach and right away we knew we wanted to plan our dream Disney Wedding at Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL.

Then we get home…we begin the wedding planning process and we begin chatting with our Disney Wedding consultant to plan our fairytale nuptials. While we were planning we were continuing to be optimistic hoping that ’14 days to slow the spread’ would be long forgotten by the time our May 2021 wedding rolled around but as weeks turned into months it became obvious that COVID wasn’t going anywhere and like many couples it was time to make a decision…do we postpone or do we continue on.

The brings us to our decision…after carefully reviewing CDC guidelines and Walt Disney World guidelines we decided 2021 wasn’t our time to get married and instead made the tough decision to postpone till May 2022…so here’s some factors that contributed to our decision and some of our feelings…I figured this would be a cathartic exercise to express the sadness and frustration I (as well as so many other people have been feeling).

General Concerns

Before I dive into the Disney COVID guidelines which was a big factor in our decision to postpone our wedding it’s first important to note the overall feelings Mike and I had regarding continuing on with the wedding as planned.

A big factor was that fully plan on having a big wedding with family members that vary in age and vary with health concerns…the last thing we want is for anyone to get sick at our wedding or feel a sense of obligation to attend even if they don’t feel comfortable being around crowds of people or traveling etc…we want everyone to feel happy and carefree, we don’t want a pandemic and nervous feelings clouding our day and everyone’s experience. Since our families are from the East Coast, everyone would pretty much need to board a plane or drive to Orlando for the wedding so we felt with the uncertainty in the world around COVID it still was too early to ask people to travel and leave the safety of their home for us, it felt selfish and not right.

Another huge factor for us was cost…COVID has caused financial impacts on a lot of people, and out of concern for our guests we knew asking people to pay to travel and stay at a hotel while we still await the jobs market to recuperate wasn’t the right thing to do.

Now to get to Disney Wedding Guidelines…which also greatly impacted our decision to postpone…

I want to note we fully understand these guidelines are for overall guest safety and health, I think it’s great Disney Wedding’s are trying to find a way to still allow couples to have their Happily Ever After and plenty of couples are continuing to have their wedding at WDW with these guidelines…we just felt it wasn’t a fit for us and wanted to hold out for normalcy.

Mask Requirement

Currently everyone attending and participating in a Disney Wedding must wear a mask at all times except as the bride and groom walk dow the aisle and exchange vows…other than that masks are required for guests, photos, in between reception and cocktail hour etc. Personally if I am spending a ton of hair, makeup, my dream venue etc I want to have no aspect of COVID in my wedding memories, especially a mask, and since we both agreed this was not a memory we wanted in our photos, videos etc we knew we wanted to postpone until masks are fully gone and the world is back to normal (or as normal as we can hope).

Guest Count

Mike has a large family and we anticipate 100-150 guests, right now Disney for our venue was limiting guest count to 25 which simply wouldn’t work for us so that was a big factor as well. We are hoping once things become normal, the regular guest counts can resume.

No Characters

One of my favorite parts about Disney and once of the aspects I am most excited about for my Disney Wedding is having Mickey + Minnie at our reception! Unfortunately for overall health + safety guidelines character experiences are not available at your wedding as they don’t want guests hugging or touching the characters.

So What’s Next?

So here we are…we had sent out our Save The Dates, we had begun planning our big day, my dress is sitting in a warehouse waiting for me to walk down the aisle in it and we are sitting waiting for the world to go back to normal. Disney Weddings only allows you to book exactly one year from the date you want so unfortunately to book for May 2022 we need to wait till May 2021…sad to think our wedding would of been this year but we have to wait another year and a half…but I don’t think anyone could have predicted the world being this upside down and uncertain for this long…we sure didn’t, we waited till December to make the decision to postpone as we kept holding out hope.

We feel sad but are optimistic things will brighten up soon. We just bought our first home so we will take this time we would’ve been wedding planning to instead renovate, design + make our house a home! We know there’s a lot going on in the world and our wedding being moved isn’t the most tragic thing to happen but we can’t help but feel a bit sad and helpless because we still don’t know what the future holds or when or if life will ever return to normal…praying for some magic + pixie dust in the future and our love goes out to brides and grooms to be encountering the same struggle as us…lots of tough decisions with what should be a happy time.

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