Hello friends and family,

We hope you are all safe and well.

As you are aware, things didn't exactly go to plan. We are really sorry to those of you that had to deal with cancelling or postponing flights and accommodation and hope that you managed to recover your expenses.

After an emotional year of postponing, reorganising vendors and dates, and hoping that the world will get back to some sense of normality, we have made the difficult decision to go ahead with the ceremony part of our wedding in the UK. We feel that life is too short to indefinitely delay the legal part of our marriage, so we are going to hike up a little munro in Scotland to get legally married on the 12th May 2021. It will just be us, the celebrant, and two photographers as witnesses since that is all that is legal and safe at the moment. We are sorry that we didn’t let you know sooner. Up until last week (end of April), we weren’t even sure if we would be allowed to go ahead with this plan because of Home Office related delays, restrictions on travel outside of our local area within the UK, closure of hair and makeup providers, and the closure of holiday accommodation. These things have all been illegal here for much of the past year but seem to have opened up just in time for our little adventure :)

We still plan to have our official wedding reception back in Australia when possible and safe (and possibly an additional blessing ceremony or renewal ceremony), and look forward to officially celebrating our marriage with you all at this time. It's hard to say when this will be, but we expect that it won't be until 2022 at the earliest. We will re-plan this at a later date when we have more certainty, and will send through your new invitations with the new details. We really hope that you will be able to come because we miss you all!

As you can probably imagine, a lot has changed over the past year, and our dream of a Northern Lights honeymoon in Finland has been replaced with a short road trip around the Scottish Highlands after the legal ceremony (we have just found out that the restrictions will be lifted in time!). For this reason we have changed a lot of the details of our registry, and you will find that it is a bit vague at the moment. For those of you who have already gifted us a present for our Finland honeymoon, thank you and we are sorry that we won't be able to use it for its intended purpose. We promise to put it towards something special in Scotland instead and will send you photos!

For everybody else, we understand that a good portion of the world is under some form of financial stress right now, so we don’t have any expectation of wedding gifts. So please don't worry about offending us if you can't or don't want to give a wedding gift. We completely understand. For those who might still wish to, please don’t worry about gifts until we can celebrate with you at the Australian wedding reception portion of our ‘day’. We are currently still living in a very small apartment with no space or storage, but we do hope to be living in a larger house by the time we are able to have our wedding reception with you. We will try to organise some more details when we send out the new invitations at a later date.

We can't wait to see you at our wedding reception (and possible additional ceremony), hopefully at some point in 2022!

Best wishes

Jess and Ryan

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