In this contributed photo are Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel Thomas on their wedding day, April 4.

The coronavirus pandemic is no respecter of the wedding-planning process.

Two couples understand that all too well, certainly having anticipated their special days to be memorable, just not quite in the way that they ultimately played out.

Here are the stories of how their “I do” ceremonies took a turn from being all figured out to resorting to plan B — a virtual wedding.

Kayla Wright and Gabriel Thomas

A virtual wedding, Kayla Wright points out, “is where you can watch the wedding ceremony from the comfort of your own home.”

In this June 2019 contributed photo taken in Haiti are Katie Herrmann and Aaron Gaskins, who were married Saturday.

There are many streaming services from which to choose.

“We decided to use Facebook Live to stream our wedding,” explained Kayla of their April 4 small country-setting wedding that originally was to have been held in a much bigger traditional church setting May 23.

But first some background.

Born and raised in Steubenville, Kayla is the daughter of Jim and Tracy Wright. She graduated from Edison High School, earned an associate’s degree in applied science in dental assisting at Eastern Gateway Community College and works at Choi Orthodontics.

Her husband, Gabriel Thomas, was born in Wheeling but grew up in Bloomingdale. His parents are Mike and Kathy Thomas. A graduate of Indian Creek High School, he, too, studied at EGCC, graduating with an associate’s degree in liberal arts. He works in construction.

“Gabriel and I have a long history together, and it all began when my family started going to Finley United Methodist Church where Gabriel has attended his whole life. We’re not sure of the exact year, but we believe we were around 7 or 8. We became friends and would hang out together at church events,” she explained. “June 26, 2012, is when we officially began dating.”

By September 2017, Gabriel moved to Savannah, Ga., to pursue construction work, ushering in a six-month period of long-distance dating.

Two months later, he flew Kayla to Georgia for the weekend, an occasion for popping the question.

“On Nov. 18, 2017, he took me to Harbor Town on Hilton Head Island, S.C., took me to the top of the lighthouse and proposed to me. I was so shocked,” Kayla recalled, noting her then-fiance returned to the area in February 2018 “because long distance wasn’t fun, especially now that we were engaged.”

Soon after getting engaged, Kayla and Gabriel set their wedding date, choosing May 23, 2020.

“We had planned for a large wedding with about 300 guests,” she said. The ceremony was to be held at the United Methodist Church of the Cross in East Springfield with the reception at the nearby Countryside.

“We asked our wedding party of 16, two flower girls and two ring bearers to be in the wedding about a year in advance. We had Chelsea Householder to DJ. We had booked our photographer a year in advance. We had planned for a two-week honeymoon to Tybee Island, Ga.,” she said of wedding details tended to.

March 18, however, brought the decision to cancel everything, courtesy of COVID-19 pandemic guidelines and restrictions in place.

“We spent days talking to our families, really trying to weigh the pros and cons going forward with the wedding or not,” Kayla explained. “It wasn’t looking good with all the new reports and the stay-at-home orders being extended. I was out of work as a nonessential worker, so our income was decreased — not a good thing when you’re trying to pay for a big ol’ wedding. Some of the bridesmaids’ dresses were coming from China, and we were not sure if they would get them before the date,” she continued.

“We did not want to keep dishing money out and come to the day and not be able to have our wedding,” she recalled the reasoning process behind the cancellation.

“We announced March 18 that we canceled everything. We called all our vendors and told them that we decided to cancel everything due to the COVID-19. I was crushed. I cried and moped about it for a couple of days. I had a lot of self-pity for myself. Gabriel suggested, well let’s just married sooner,” she noted.

“We were going to try to get married that weekend, but we couldn’t get a marriage license because the courthouse was closed. We didn’t want to wait any longer — we had waited long enough, and it no longer was happening the way we planned,” Kayla said.

“On March 31, I called the Jefferson County Courthouse again in hopes we could get a marriage license, and that day we were able to go. Things were looking up. We got the marriage license, and we tentatively picked April 11 to get married. We decided to do an outside ceremony to keep with social distancing,” she noted. “We have family friends who own a beautiful farm on state Route 213 in Steubenville — the Granatirs. They were so excited and honored that I asked them if they could host our wedding. I started watching the weather, and April 11 wasn’t looking good,” she continued.

On April 1 — no fooling — Kayla asked Gabriel if it would be crazy to get married that weekend, on April 4.

“He said, ‘No, let’s do it,” she explained. “So I called the Granatirs, and they said they could make it happen. My grandmother, Susan Wright-Bongart, had to make alterations on my dress. I asked my friend and co-worker Courtney Flesher to do photography. I asked my sister-in-law Mary Wright and Caitlin Kirpatrick to help me get ready. My grandfather, Mike Bongart, is a retired pastor so he officiated the wedding. My brother, Chris Wright, set up the live stream. Gabriel and I built our arbor the night before,” Kayla said of how all the details came together quickly.

“We planned this wedding in three days. It was the best day,” she said.

“It was even more amazing because we didn’t have to hire out for anything, not that we could’ve anyway. We had people who love and care about us help us with everything. We were determined to still have the most perfect day despite all the trouble and loss of money COVID-19 has caused us and turn it into something so beautiful,” she said.

“We have no regrets what we planned for on April 4, 2020. We think it was much better than what we had planned for, for our big wedding,” she added.

Once the couple moved up their wedding date, they announced their new save the date on Facebook.

“We created a group on Facebook that we invited all our family and friends to. We would go live in the group the day of the wedding so everyone could still watch,” she explained. “We would have loved to have more than just our family, but it wasn’t going to be possible. I see so many people going live on Facebook or streaming events, so I thought why can’t we do that for those at home. I called it the Ohio Valley royal wedding — that’s exactly what the royals do when they get married, they cast it live. We received great feedback from everyone for our idea. Everyone loved being able to still be a part of our day,” Kayla said.

“We are still in the process of canceling our honeymoon — they’re so busy because everyone is trying to change or cancel — so we’re having a hard time doing so. We plan to do our honeymoon later on in the year once COVID-19 is gone,” she noted.

In the meantime, the couple are making their home in Pottery Addition, Steubenville.

“It is going to be a day we will never forget obviously, but we are going to have great stories to share about April 4 for a long time.

“We can’t wait to share our story with our kids some day.”

Katie Herrmann

and Aaron Gaskins

Katie Hermann and Aaron Gaskins got married yesterday — April 25 — as they had planned. And it was at Holy Family Church in Steubenville, just as they had planned.

But it wasn’t quite what they originally envisioned.

“When we got engaged in August 2019, we planned for me to move home from Haiti in April and get married on April 25,” Katie explained. “We had a list of 300 guests, Holy Family Church, the reception hall and our honeymoon to a resort in Mexico all booked and ready.

“Then the pandemic hit. I had to leave Haiti early, saying my bittersweet goodbyes to the orphans and mission staff among many tears. I didn’t realize what was actually happening in the rest of the world, because I was busy at work in the village so when I got home, it hit me. The whole wedding must change.

“Not many brides have to go back to their wedding planning list and call back everyone to cancel,” she lamented.

But first some details.

Katie grew up in Wintersville and is the daughter of John and Karen Herrmann. Her father worked as a physics professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville for 47 years.

Her fiance-now-husband is Aaron Gaskins of Fredericksburg, Va. His parents are Aaron Gaskins Sr. and Matilde Gaskins.

Katie graduated from Catholic Central High School and Franciscan University. Aaron went to Colonial Forge High School and Sentara College of Health Sciences in Virginia. He has been working as an ICU nurse for the last five years and is currently in the CRNA (nurse anesthetist) program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“I graduated from Franciscan and immediately went to work as a missionary with the poor in a small village in Haiti,” Katie explained. “I worked with our organization for the past 10 years as the director of an orphanage of 35 children. Our mission, Haiti180, has an orphanage, a school that serves more than 300 children, a new clinic that already serves more than 3,000 villagers and an elderly home for men and women who we find abandoned in the far reaches of the mountains,” she said, noting information and the opportunity to donate can be checked out at the website www.Haiti180.com.

“Aaron came to our orphanage in Haiti in November 2018 on a mission trip, and we immediately hit it off. When he got back to the airport in Port-at-Prince to catch his flight to Miami, he messaged me, and our relationship led us to where we are now, getting married on Saturday,” she communicated through e-mailed questions. “What struck me about Aaron was the compassion and care he took in relating with the Haitian people. He truly cared for the whole person, whether it was a woman on the side of the road with her children selling items to make money for her family, or the elderly and children in our mission who also immediately loved him. I knew he was special right from the start because of his ease in serving others so compassionately. He was not afraid to hold the little elderly woman’s hand when she spoke to him in Creole, a language he did not know, or push the little children at the orphanage on the swings for hours on end. I knew he related to the Haitians the same way he related to his patients in the hospital, with so much love and tenderness,” she noted.

While the pandemic restrictions threw a monkey wrench in their initial wedding plans, the couple decided to proceed with the wedding Mass anyway and live stream it for family and friends to watch.

“Maybe we’ll have a reception in a few months, but the most important thing to us is the sacrament of marriage, and we would just rather be married and together during these strange and unprecedented times, especially since Aaron puts his life at risk each time he steps into the ICU,” Katie explained.

The wedding was on Facebook livestream at 1 p.m. on her Facebook page and Aaron’s. “We can only have 10 people, so it’s me and Aaron, the priest, our parents, a musician, a photographer and the person running the livestream for us,” she had explained in the days leading up to the ceremony.

“None of my eight brothers and sisters can be there, not even my twin brother Billy who lives in Arizona. Aaron’s sister and his family in Virginia won’t be able to come either. No best man, no maid of honor or wedding party.”

Such is not the stuff of a little girl’s dream of what her wedding day will be like — no guests, no first dance with her new husband and no father-daughter dance.

“It’s not easy to abandon our desires for a wedding perfectly planned, ” she added when asked what she’d most like to get across to readers about their unconventional wedding ceremony, “but to us, it’s not about our reception or decorations, etc. It’s about our marriage in front of God. And as strange as it will be to walk down the aisle in an empty, echoing church, at the end of the day, we will be husband and wife.

“And the coronavirus won’t stop us.”

(Kiaski can be contacted at jkiaski@heraldstaronline.com.)