wedding we never had...

[sally81]

Hi! I would love to hear what others think about this situation...

My now-husband and I were officially married in late 2006 - a bit over a year ago. We had been together for almost 4 years at that point. He's originally from South America, was here in the US for 4 years of college and then worked for a year after graduation on a visa. The circumstances were that his visa was about to expire and we didnt know what to do. We had been thinking about all kinds of ways that would enable us to be together -- me moving to his country, his company attempting to sponsor him for a visa -- but everything kept failing. We finally realized that if we were going to all of this effort to ensure we would be together, why didnt we just get married? We definitely were but had just not thought about it seriously until that point. We got engaged - it was very sweet - and decided to just get married straight away so that we wouldnt have to put off the green card application. We could have waited (his status would have still been legal while we were engaged) with a traditional engagement, but we just wanted to get that whole process over with, especially so that we could then buy a place, travel, and he could work wherever he wanted. It was so great to get all of that over with and start living our lives the way we wanted to and not by anyone elses' rules!

Since we did it on such short notice (less than a month after getting engaged), we had a courthouse wedding and only my parents were able to be in attendance. The whole idea was that we would have a 'real' wedding at some point after the whole green card process was ironed out. Of course its been weird for all of our relatives and friends since we were engaged one month and married the next and they never witnessed a ceremony or anything. We were originally planning on having a wedding in 2007, because my parents really wanted to have something for us, but it ended up being put on hold because they were in serious financial crisis -- holding 2 mortgages while their house wouldnt sell, plus my dad lost his job. They are back on their feet now and we're now planning something for January 2009- a simple vow renewal on a beach resort in Florida with a reception afterwards.

My question to everyone is, how should we announce this to our guests -- as a vow renewal, or as our wedding? I guess since we've now been married for over a year we are leaning toward the very nontraditional route and are looking for ways to make this creative, unique, and original. For example, I'm not having any attendants. We're sure that at least our family will want to provide gifts (everyone has asked, and my parents had said to hold off until we have our wedding) and we're also wondering how we should handle 'registries' -- while any gift would be great and very appreciated, we dont want it to seem expected since this is technically a vow renewal.

I just wanted to see what everyone thought about the best way to handle all of these preparations since the concept of 'wedding etiquette' doesnt really apply in this case, since its so nontraditional. At the same time, it is really special since I was never able to say my vows in front of family and friends. Has anyone else ever been in a situation where they got married first and then had a 'wedding' at a later date?