Micro Weddings During a Pandemic

Two Couples Share Challenges and Success Stories for a Micro Wedding

Who knew last year we would be scrapping the usual festive wedding season and re-inventing it smaller but better in 2020?  We miss so many things about life before the pandemic, like bear hugs, warm handshakes, and the atta-boy back pat.  Perhaps the greatest adjustment are our Cape Cod wedding celebrations, scaled down to micro wedding size for the realities of the pandemic.   

Love conquers all, so we adapt.  Join us as we talk to two happy couples who share the highs and lows of pulling off a micro wedding in 2020.  

Meet Sam and Jenna Frawley 

Sam Frawley is a valued and extremely talented former employee from the Woods Hole Inn, perhaps you will recognize him from his years of service at our front desk.  When we received the news of his engagement to the beautiful Jenna, our first thoughts were “This is amazing news, we can not wait to host their family and friends at the Inn.” But with news of COVID 19, Sam and Jenna’s Cape Cod wedding plans had to be revised: 

“We had a full wedding planned on Cape Cod with about 75 people attending and because our date was at the end of May 2020, most of the travel restrictions were still in place. Many were still feeling a lot of anxiety around traveling and having a lot of people in one place. Jen and I decided we wanted to go ahead and get married, so we found a beautiful Airbnb in Leiper’s Fork, a small town outside of Nashville. We decided to keep it local and just invited our immediate family and a few close friends. We got our wedding guest list down 18 people. Unfortunately, my sister and youngest brother couldn’t attend because of where they worked. Other than my siblings missing the wedding day, I honestly wouldn’t have changed a thing. It was a very special and intimate day and Jenna and I really got to enjoy every moment of the day. The location was beautiful, we had awesome food, and our families really had a great time together.”

∼◊∼

Meet Allie & Brian Kennedy

Allie and Brian met freshman year of college in Maine and now live in NYC. Allie grew up spending summers at Nobska Point here in Woods Hole. Her parents recently bought the house and she wanted to get married in a place that was both meaningful and beautiful.  As their plans shifted with the pandemic, Allie and Brian realized that their new smaller wedding would still be perfect in Woods Hole.

“We were supposed to have a 250 person wedding in my parents’ backyard on Nobska Point Woods Hole on Labor Day weekend. We had sent out the Save the Dates, but not yet ordered invitations when the pandemic hit in early March. We both had a feeling from the very beginning that our wedding would not be able to happen the way we had planned. We decided to postpone our party until 2021 for the health of all of our guests. However, we decided to move ahead with a small ceremony on the planned date in 2020, because we’d been together for 10 years and were so ready to be married! 

In the end, our wedding was perfect! We still had the wedding in my parents’ backyard and used the same caterer, photographer, and officiant (my dad!) as we’d originally planned, but had 20 guests instead of 250. Because the guest list was so small, we were able to make our ceremony really intimate. Everyone sat in a circle, and there was time for everyone to share something with us to take into our marriage — a memory, story, quote, or piece of advice. With this, our wedding felt so unique, as only this group of people coming together could have made it as beautiful as it was. We celebrated by having a delicious dinner and watching a blood moon rise over the bay, the perfect end to a perfect wedding. While the past several months have been so challenging, we feel lucky that we got to have such a small wedding. And we’re looking forward to celebrating again with our full guest list next year!”

As we approach the golden hues of fall with crisp winter wonders to follow, we hope to be able to help happy couples make their big day come true with our Micro Wedding and Elopement packages. 

See Rooms at the Woods Hole Inn here.

See dinners at Quicks Hole Tavern, our sister restaurant here.