When you don’t have a coordinator (like I did) for your wedding there are a couple of things you can do to combat the amount of things and tasks that must occur on the wedding day:
Delegate, delegate, delegate
Cry a little
Ask a family friend to be your ceremony organizer and tell people to walk down the aisle
Cry some more
Have your best man be in charge of the wedding certificate for the officiant to sign
Personally, I opted in for all of these options. And while I wish I could do some things over (like not make my mom or bridesmaids do as much as they did) there is one thing in particular I now ensure never happens to ANY of our brides.
On the day of our wedding, we had tasked our best man with making sure the wedding certificate would get signed by our officiant, a pastor from our church who was going to lead our ceremony and stay awhile after to enjoy the evening with his wife. After our ceremony ended our entire bridal party gathered with family to take photos, and soon after we found ourselves in the reception hall, dancing the night away and then being cheered on as we walked to our getaway car and drove to our hotel.
However - we didn’t realize was that we had a very important thing missing from our luggage.
Our marriage license was nowhere to be found, and turns out it wasn’t even signed - technically, Jacob and I weren’t even legally married!
Freaking out - Jacob and his best man started texting one another as we checked into our hotel room. We needed the signed wedding certificate to take with us on our honeymoon to prove to the resort that we were in the 3 month range of our wedding date so we could take advantage of all the honeymoon perks we had signed up for!
Luckily for us (and not so luckily for our best man) our officiant was going to be at our church the next day for morning set up - at 6AM. Our best man had flown in from out of town and so he had to borrow a friends car to meet up with our officiant in the morning, get him to sign our certificate, drive to our hotel, drop off the certificate, and then drive back to his hotel before heading back to the airport to make his flight that morning.
And this all happened before 8AM. What. A. Morning.
Nowadays - at our company we take charge of the wedding certificate - ensuring that 1) it gets signed and 2) we put it in the correct bag for the bride and groom to take with them or keep at their home until they return from their honeymoon.
Moral of the story - if you’re going to delegate, give it over to a wedding coordinator or you may not end up legally married.