civil services - how to fill the gaps?

Civil ceremonies are quite a bit shorter than church services and so there aren't really any 'gaps'. They can be anything from 10 - 30 minutes long and you can have readings and songs if you like.

There are no gaps! SIL2B had a civil wedding and it was 10 minutes long, MAX!

They are fairly short and people usually do reading or poems in between vows, or you can have someone sing, can vary between 10 mins to 30 mins, short but sweet!! No gaps at all.

We just submitted the vows we wanted to say last week to the registrar and we just picked the standard options without any readings or optional vows...

The registrar then rang to say that because of our choices the ceremony would be really short (10 mins) and did we want to reconsider our options??

Bit stuck now as to what to do...

We've chosen the longer vows, we're having two readings, the registrar is doing a reading and we're having at least one song. For us, it's the most important part of the day - we want to make the most of it.

We are having a civil service and to be honest I want it to be short and sweet, as a guest of many civil and church weddings I have found the long drawn out ones to be quite boring, the kids there (if any) lose their attention span within 2 minutes and start trying to play and even the adults in my family start getting itchy feet, maybe it's just my family but personally 10-15 minutes is more than enough for me. Another major point is that I know I will cry and my make up wont stand 30 minutes of crying, the photos would be awful.

Same here, it's a "once in a lifetime experience" as far as we're concerned, we're paying out enough for the privilege and we want to make the most of it, and hopefully those who we care about that have been invited to share the day with us do as well. Like the speeches, a boring ceremony is only boring if it's badly run, disorganised and dreary. We hope that our plans will keep people's attention and they will appreciate the day to its fullest instead of sloping off to the bar at every opportunity.

We've got one of the readings from the selection offered as 'additional vows' for us, the guest vows, and a reading by a guest. Then, once the registrars have done their bit and departed, a friend is doing us a blessing ceremony afterwards, so we have all the benefits of a full Church service (instead of the legal bits and the religious bits all intertwined they're basically ceremony part 1 and ceremony part 2) but it's just not actually in a church building. We fully expect the whole thing to be around 50 minutes long.

You can have a very basic and short wedding ceremony which takes about 10 minutes, but that's not our style.

Yes, there is the problem of children getting bored and disruptive, but we're very much of the opinion that children are their parent's responsibility not to spoil our day by making excess noise at inappropriate moments, and trust that they will have the common sense to remove their children from the ceremony room (or during the other formal bits like the speeches) so as to not ruin the day for everyone. But then again, many people do have "child free" weddings these days so it's really a concession to allow people to bring their children along to what is really an adult day (although some feel it's more a family occasion, and I suppose if you do have a lot of young children within your family - which we don't - I can understand why).

There aren't any gaps! The ceremony will be fairly short, the only time that might need 'filling' is when you sign the register. But most people will be wanting to take photos and gossipping abouot how wonderful you look.