Ceremony programs (for dummies)

Before I get to the central topic of this post, let me back up a little.

As I mentioned, we are getting married in the Catholic Church. However, we are not doing a full mass, but decided on a wedding ceremony instead. According to the church, this is called a "marriage outside of mass", but to most people, it means no Holy Communion and about 30 minutes versus an hour (or more).

We made this decision for a few reasons. First, Mr. Turkey is not Catholic. Not that this fact always precludes you from having a full mass, but, depending on the church (or priest), it may. However, this fact wasn't what ultimately drove the decision. 

The decision to do a ceremony came from the time of our "slot" at the church. When we secured our date, almost 14 months before the wedding, all of the afternoon times had been taken and the only time remaining was 6:30pm.*

Source

I don't know about you, but to us it felt LATE. Although we attended one wedding that started at 7:30pm (which was even later), we were more familiar with church starting at 3pm or 5pm (St. Patrick's did not have a 5pm slot due to the Saturday vigil mass). But, no matter how odd it seemed to us, that time was what it was.

In the end, our guests are already going to be out late - the reception doesn't end until the next day (12:30am) - so we decided to save the half hour and go with the 30 minute ceremony over the 60 minute mass. Decision made. 

And now to the part of this post that ties to the title (only took me this long...).

We are meeting with the priest on Saturday and I wanted to share with him a draft of our ceremony program before meeting with Two Paperdolls to do the final design (you'll see why later. Hint: I'm not a designer). 

When setting our readings and music, the church was very helpful. Early on, we received a booklet which listed out the most popular readings for weddings. 

I considered this the wedding version of "Choose Your Own Adventure"

This booklet was a lifesaver when making our reading and vow decisions. Despite our wedding attendance record, we didn't have any readings in mind and were not familiar enough with the Bible to pull from there. The music decision took a bit more time (another post to come on this), but again, we had a very helpful form to work with. Easy enough.

But the program was the problem. I could find 100s of online resources with templates of Catholic mass programs. However, I really struggled to find a site that listed out the timeline for a Catholic ceremony. To be honest, I was looking for something very similar to the great resource Miss Hawk shared for invitation wording...but for my program. The ideal situation would be a plug and chug - you know, "enter reading 1 here", "enter reader 1 here"...

With these failed attempts, I did the next logical thing - winged it. Below, I present to you, our drafted marriage ceremony program.

Front cover on right, back cover on left - this is pretty generic

The middle pages

I created this program in PowerPoint because, well, I really only seem to have a gift for Microsoft Office tools when it comes to wedding planning (I'll leave the Photoshop expertise to others)! And with that, now you can see why we'll have someone else create the final product - need some serious help with the fonts and lining things up. :) The content came from the church resources, adding in headers and, well, a little timeline "guessing" based on years of church-going.

We have not received sign-off from our priest yet, but I think this program draft is pretty darn close. I'll come back and share any changes with you next week...then feel free to copy if needed!

Did any other Catholic ceremony brides have issue finding good resources for their program? And tell me if this looks off - I have 1 day to fix it!

*Fun fact: we found out just last week that now we are the only couple getting married on our date. Too late for us to make a change, but to those brides who have their heart set on a specific time, check in with your church - maybe a slot will open!