Is anyone not doing a sit down dinner?

Is anyone doing a buffet or cocktail reception or something like that instead (where there is no formal seating arrangements - no place cards etc...)?? I'm thinking about doing this, but I already bought my favors and I bought them with a sit-down dinner in mind. One of them (a personalized bookmark) was going to be at each guest's place and the other (mini vases with flowers in them) were going to serve as place card holders. I still want to use my favors - how should I incorporate them into a non-sit-down dinner? Thanks girls!

Also, please tell me what other things you are doing to make your non-sit down dinner special and to kind of tie every one together.

Is there a way you can do the seating arrangements even though you aren't doing a sit down dinner? Or will there not be as many seats as there are guests?

You could have each table have a different theme. Depending on how many tables you are having, you could have seasons of the year- or months. Or someone in another post said they are doing countries or flowers. I'm doing cities of one country. Maybe past decades??

Also you could have old family pictures on the tables. Or perhaps get copies made of photos from past family weddings to set at each table? Or pictures of you and FH at different stages of your relationship.

Hope this helps.

Hi, I'm already married & we had a cocktail style reception but I didn't like the idea of no seating arrangments so here's what we did. Regular cocktail hour(usually not done w/cocktail style recept's but our location needed time to switch over our ceremony room)It was beautiful, I'm glad we did it. We had placecards that were like favors too & seating arrangments(we had many older guests & I didn't think they would know what to do otherwise) We only sat 8-10 at tables that held 12 so people could more around better. Our salad was served to our guests at their seats so that everyone would have a little while at the table to chat. We had a cigar bar & pictures of family displayed & we really wanted people to mingle & they did. When it was time for the main coarse the Maitre D went around to two tables at a time so there was no 'the buffet is open' feel. We had tons of food & our location did a great job. Our favors were large & breakable so the staff handed them out to guests at their tables after cake.
That's all I can think of now-it took alot of planning & we changed things several times before we decided how we should actually do it.
We were thrilled with the way it turned out & we got so many compliments on the wedding being unique. I was the last of 30 or cousins to get married so I wanted to go a different route.

We are planning a cocktail reception also...not complete yet. The basic idea so far is...when the guests arrive there will be wine bottles with place tags hanging from the neck(thankyou for coming sort of thing). The cocktail hour is just going to be passed hors'deuvres(sp?). Then people will be brought into the main dining room where there will be a preset. First dance, etc., and then the guests will be told the buffet is open. We are going to have stations instead of a one line buffet, so folks can go where they want. I am also thinking of doing the bookmarks, but I will just have them next to the bread plate or somthing like that. Hope this helps, like I said we aren't in the final stages yet so we haven't worked out all the kinks.