If you’re having a wedding in 2021, you’re likely asking yourself all kinds of safety questions. This particular piece is about wearing masks at weddings.
If you’re looking for guidance on other pandemic-related questions including if you should ask your guests and vendors about vaccination status and how to create a COVID safety policy for your wedding, please go here for 30+ free pandemic wedding planning resources.
As for this story, the topic of wearing masks is, of course, evolving. I’m writing this article on July 30, 2021, after a week of rapidly changing guidance from the CDC, the U.S. federal government, and (depending on where you live in the U.S.) more local government agencies.
My goal is to make this piece as useful as possible for as long as possible. As such, I’ve written it as a series of questions to help guide conversations that I believe will serve you and your partner no matter where we’re at in the course of the pandemic.
Of course, if I’ve missed something or you have a question yourself, please reach out. I’m at elisabeth@elisabethkramer.com.
Thanks for (still) doing the tough thing and talking about COVID. I know it’s not easy but I swear, it’ll be worth it. Why? Because the goal of a wedding is to feel joy and it’s much easier to feel joy when we also feel safe.
Should we wear masks at our wedding? Use these questions to help guide you.
Question 1: What is currently legal for the locations where we are hosting our wedding?
This question is important because we don’t want you to break the law or to ask people to break the law on your behalf. The easiest way to figure out what is legal is to consider the question in four parts:
What is currently legal in the country where we are hosting our wedding?
What is currently legal in the state where we are hosting our wedding?
What is currently legal in the county where we are hosting our wedding?
What is currently legal at the venue(s) where we are hosting our wedding?
Most people are well-versed in the first two; great! We can easily check those off. As for the other two — county and venue(s) — things can get a bit more nuanced.
Usually you can pull up county-issued guidance fairly easily by Googling some combination of “COVID safety regulations and [insert county where you’re hosting your wedding]” or “COVID guidance for live events and [insert county where you’re hosting your wedding].” It’s unlikely the county’s guidance will be much different than the state’s but if things are really unclear for your particular area, call the county.
Then we come to the, unfortunately, hardest-to-answer question: What’s legal at your venue(s)? I say “unfortunately” because in my experience, venues aren’t super great at knowing what’s currently legal.
That’s not because the people who run venues are bad or stupid. It’s because the guidance keeps changing and often is not clearly communicated because of how quickly things keep changing. Not to mention, many of us are overwhelmed, understaffed, and, after the past year, emotionally exhausted.
As such, please approach any question around legality from a place of empathy. Be nice. If you’re not getting the answers you need, consider a phone or video call. I’ve found that questions that take 30 emails to answer can usually be solved in five minutes of IRL conversation.
What are you even asking? Try this:
Because of the ever-changing nature of COVID health and safety guidance, we wanted to check-in with your team.
Last we spoke, the guidance would allow your venue to [insert what your last understanding was of working with this venue. Usually in the U.S. this has recently been and may still be something like “host a 2019-style event (i.e. no masks, no distancing) regardless of vaccination status with no limit on headcount beyond what the fire marshal previously assigned for the building and regardless of if the venue is indoors or outdoors.”].
Has there been any change to this guidance for your venue? We ask so that we can be sure and abide by what is legal as well as what is safe so thank you for your help as we navigate these (still!) challenging times.
When do you ask this? Usually, the catalyst for this conversation is money, i.e. payments for a wedding start coming due. Check your contracts to be sure but often, those final balances won’t start coming in until 60 days before a wedding.
That’s part of the reason why I recommend 60 days as the deadline for having a COVID safety policy in some kind of shape for your wedding. If 60 days is your deadline, I imagine you’d want to begin these conversations two? three weeks? before then so you don’t feel crunched to finish the policy on deadline.
That said, sometimes couples want to have the “is it legal?” conversation long before the 60-day mark because they want to send some kind of guest-facing communication, like a save-the-date or invite. Totally fair (though I still think you should say something about COVID for a 2021 wedding because your guests will be wondering).
The main risk of starting this particular conversation much earlier in your wedding planning is that there is a good chance the guidance will change so either plan to have continued conversations with your venue(s), guests, and vendors or, if you can, kick the can on sending that guest-facing communication. Again, I go into one strategy here.
What if you’re NOT hosting your wedding at a professional events venue and instead am hosting your wedding at, say, a private home or in a park?
In many cases, this is really blurry so my advice is to start with the point of contact for the venue(s). If this is a private home, that contact might be, idk, your mom. If it’s an Airbnb, it would be the person who owns the Airbnb. If it’s a park, it’ll be the parks and rec department and, potentially, the county.
There is a lot of grey area when we're talking about what’s legal at a, shall I say, “non-traditional” venue. That’s been true for more than a year and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon. As such, I remain an advocate for clear, honest communication even if it feels like overkill. Proceed as you and your partner see fit.
Whatever the situation, how your venue(s) reply to the italicized section above will influence the following things for you and your partner:
How many people — guests and vendors — the venue is OK with you having. Be sure and note if these regulations are different if we’re talking indoor venue or outdoor venue.
What, if anything, you need to ask of those people — guests and vendors — to maintain health and safety at your wedding. Be sure and note if these regulations are different based on vaccination status and if proof of vaccination status is required.
This now brings us to the second and arguably much harder question: What are you and your partner personally OK with?
Question 2: What are our personal boundaries as the couple hosting this wedding?
In nearly all cases, a professional venue space is not going to tell you and your partner news you don’t want to hear because honestly, it’s bad for business.
This means that the real heavy lifting for COVID safety + your wedding is going to fall squarely on the shoulders of you and your partner. As if you didn’t already have a lot going on…
For the foreseeable future, here’s what I recommend you and your partner do:
You know what is legal. Now, you two need to talk about what is safe. You can do this by developing a COVID safety policy for your wedding. Yes, I know that might seem unnecessary but believe me, the exercise is useful.
Why is this useful? Lots of reasons but the biggest one is by talking about COVID in some capacity you are giving your guests the gift of telling them what to expect by going to a wedding in 2021. This is HUGE! I have had so many guests tell me that they got an invite in the mail and started to freak out because of course they did. When’s the last time any of us went to a multi-household gathering like a wedding?Once you two have finalized your COVID safety policy, share it with your guests AND your vendors. Here are free templates to help: for guests, for vendors. I recommend you mention COVID in any guest-facing correspondence and aim to have at least a rough draft of your safety policy publicly available when you send said guest-facing correspondence. Ideally, you will do this no later than 60 days before your wedding day (here’s my reasoning on why I recommend 60 days).
Remember: Keep checking in with yourselves.
The two previous sections will not capture everyone’s situation let alone how guidance may change between now and whenever you’re reading this. To help, I’ve done what I can to address the most common concerns on my gallery of free pandemic wedding planning resources. This includes recommendations on:
how to talk to your guests and vendors about vaccination status
what providing proof of vaccination can look like at a wedding
If this seems like a lot, I get that. It is also the nature of the time we are living in. Thankfully, because of the vaccine, we have actually not-bad options that we didn’t have a year ago. Hold on to that and please, keep talking about health and safety. It’s worth it.