Coronavirus In Minnesota: Fall Wedding Season Backed Up With Rescheduled Ceremonies
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MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- As the COVID-19 pandemic continues on longer and longer, it's forcing people who have upcoming major events to make changes.
Weddings, fundraisers and galas all across the Twin Cities are being cancelled or postponed.
Alyssa Heimer and Brian Gossett of Richfield have been engaged for about two years. They were planning on finally making things official on May 16, 2020.
"I think at first we were in denial," Heimer said.
Gossett describes the experience so far as a "slow burn."
"Things week by week or day by day would get cancelled," Gossett said.
They made the inevitable decision last week on social media to postpone their wedding to Oct. 9, 2020.
"It was kind of a gut thing for both of us. We just kind of felt like, you know, for obviously the safety and health of all of our guests," Heimer said.
Amy Zaroff, who owns Amy Zaroff Event Planning, says she is seeing dozens of her clients having to reschedule their events because of the pandemic.
"We're seeing right now that weddings through July are now being postponed," Zaroff said.
She suggests and encourages people to postpone their event over cancelling to help keep vendor businesses afloat.
"Delay the revenue to the vendors that they have selected versus eliminate it all together," Zarloff said.
She says they are starting to see a backlog of rescheduled weddings for the fall, which means couples are having to move their big days to weekdays. But Zaroff says there's a silver lining to that.
"There often times are cost savings when you don't do an event on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday night," she said.
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The future Gossetts had to move their wedding to a Friday instead of its originally-planned Saturday night. They also said a number of people have had to cancel their RSVPs because of conflicts with the new date.
Through this process though, they've gained perspective and come out of it stronger.
"There's so many people going through so much more right now … and how long this has gone on that that's where we've gotten to this mindset that this is going to be OK," Heimer said.
Zaroff says her event planning team has also noticed that most vendors in Minnesota are not adding extra fees for contract changes. They are doing whatever they can to keep the business and make the date change smooth.
Zaroff's event planning goes live daily on Instagram to interview Minnesota small business owners to discuss ways to stay positive and come out of this shutdown successfully. Follow @amyzaroff on Instagram, or go to www.todayisareasontocelebrate.com.
