Wedding receiving lines. Are they a waste of time or very important?
I'm Brian Kellogg of Kellogg Photography. I am a Columbus, Ohio wedding photographer, and I want to talk to you about if you should have a receiving line or not for your wedding. So why you should have a receiving line is it, actually I don't know if I can think of good things about it.
So, the thing why I kind of have an opposition to it, is because it takes up so much time of the wedding day itself. So, right after the ceremony, you're going to hug and handshake every single person that attended the wedding. So that takes around 20 seconds of time. So if it's 100 wedding guests, that could be up to 35 minutes that you could've been, either taking photos and then getting to the cocktail hour early to hang out with them.
Because usually during a receiving line, you're hugging people that you probably don't even know, or it's an uncle of a friend of a friend. So, but of course, you know the main people that came there, of course you want to hug them.
So what you want to do, instead of doing a receiving line, the other thing you can do is greet every table right after you eat during the reception. So, of course you get fed first during the wedding, so what you want to do is eat your food, and then visit the tables of the people that you don't see too often. Leave your friends' tables that you see all the time around your neighborhood, or around your city, leave them last because you might not be able to get to every table.
But definitely visit the tables that you haven't seen the people in a long time, or that they traveled a great distance to be there. You want to thank them and just greet every table, if they feel like giving you a hug or shaking your hand, they will do that at that time. If not, they'll just continue eating their dinner, and go on their way.
So you, that's the kind of alternative to doing a receiving line, is just greeting each table at the reception itself. But if you still want to do a receiving line, just bake into the timeline itself, that it might take up to 35 minutes, or even up to an hour, depending on how many wedding guests you have.
I don't know if you can imagine hugging and hand shaking 200 or 300 people at your wedding, and it could be like an hour and you're just drained. So, if you don't want to do that, then I highly recommend just greeting the tables at the reception itself. So, hopefully that tip helps. I hope you have a good day! Thanks!