At least in my experience, you don’t do “every female guest” That is because you have multiple showers and only a few people will get invited to each. For instance, someone on your family (not your mother or sisters, but an aunt or cousin) will throw you a family shower. Your husbands family will throw one for his side. Your girlfriends will throw one for your girlfriends. Work - even though you make it know you aren’t sending invites to your coworkers - will have a lunch with gifts. I know people who have had six or seven showers in this fashion.
I saw my very first “kitchen tea” at a restaurant recently and… man, was I baffled. I’m an American, so I’m used to bridal showers, and even the odd games that go along with many of them but this was… weird.
The bride to be paraded through restaurant wearing an apron, dish scrubber earrings, a towel on her head, sponges on her breasts, and bearing something like a ladle or spatula or something. Bizarrest thing I ever saw. And, of course, most of the presents were wrapped in dish towels. The only thing I could think was that this woman was going to have a lifetime supply of dishtowels.
Bizarre. 
I hate the whole concept of bridal showers. I can sort of understand baby showers, because a new mother might not be aware of a lot of the stuff needed to care for a baby. But bridal showers are just hideous. The whole idea of picking out gifts for a registry is just so tactless. I hate it.
Another fun game that the maid of honor can put together is to get photos of the bride from every year of her life and then have the guests try to put them in order. The mother of the bride usually does not win this game.
There is also something called a lingerie shower. The guests just buy the bride naughty undies. Then they all try something on and order a pizza to be delivered. BOOM chica-bow-WOW!
Another popular non-tacky shower activity is for everyone to write down a piece of advice for newlyweds, maybe on a nice card, and then later they’re bound together into a little book. People did this for me at my baby shower, too (only with baby advice). Or you can ask everyone to bring a favorite recipe with a personal note on it, that sort of thing. Then the bride gets a nice (and useful) remembrance of her friends.
Do kitchen teas generally involve being paraded around restaurants in a horrifying manner? Eep.
Well, I don’t think the restaurant part is traditional, and fortunately the restaurant was fairly empty, but still… No thank you.
Well, hopefully my bridesmaid won’t go to this extent!
Thanks guys for your help, fingers crossed mine goes well (won’t happen until 2 weeks before the wedding - 21st Jan 06) and I’ll try to remember to post about it after it happens!
Are you guys sure about the shower invite list only including people invited to the wedding? We were very clear that we were having a small, few members of the family only wedding, and some friends threw me a shower, unsolicited by me. I can’t see that anyone showed any poor etiquette there. We did invite the shower crowd to our housewarming a few weeks after the wedding, although honestly they would have been invited anyway, whether they’d thrown the shower or not.
I have never heard you can’t invite someone who isn’t invited to the wedding, however, you don’t want to hurt anyones feelings either. Co-workers having a shower even if no one from work is being invited, a shower in you home town when your wedding will really be soemwhere else. a shower thrown by friends when you are having an extrelmy small wedding would be ok as well. The point of a shower was for a young woman setting up her own home for the first time needed stuff that she wouldnt be getting as wedding presents. Most of us these days have everything we need already so a shower should be more about freinds celevrating than getting loot.
Minor Update:
Although I’m not supposed to know ANYTHING about the bridal shower, I know that mine is happening this Saturday.
I have no idea what is planned, although some invitees are slightly perplexed that it might be horse-related, and asked if they should they bring an equine-related gift?
Yes, guests were invited to “Ninevah’s bridle party”
:smack:
The blame lies with my bridesmaid’s husband, who’d been helping with the invites. :wally
Fortunately, my mother (who’d been rolling around on the floor laughing her ass off after hearing about this) and most of the guests have managed to see the lighter side.
What a classic!
Where’s it being held? Flemington? 
A Saddle, a riding crop and some spurs make great shower gifts.
The last wedding I was at had both men and women at the shower. Basically it was a cocktail party with gifts for the bride and groom. I thought it was great. Many of the guests, including me, were from out of the province. Having both men and women at the cocktail party meant another opportunity to socialize with friends and acquaintances of both genders. Also, there were no silly games. While I’m a person of the female variety, it seemed to me that those of the male variety enjoyed themselves.
And to nineveh best wishes for the future.
Woo! So now that I’ve discharged my duty by lying to you on the phone about my motivations for appearing at your house tomorrow afternoon, we can drop the pretence and just be normal until we arrive at your shower and you turn into Most Surprised Bridle-Shower Attendee Ever? Excellent. PS: Sorry about the lying 
SOMEONE who won’t be named but whose husband can’t spell bridal is very concerned with keeping the element of surprise going.
Note to self: Return jodhpurs.
Another nother bridal shower game involves someone writing down all the remarks the bride-to-be makes while opening the gifts, then reading them off as “This is what Julie will say on her wedding night! ‘Ooh, I’ve always wanted one of these!..What does it do?..Ooh, I know just where to put this!’”
(“Bridle shower”…Hee!)
Well, from a Canadian perspective, there is some new ways for a shower, now. Often, the party (if everyone agrees, including grandma) will go to a bar where there is entertainment; sometimes they have Jack & Jill showers where it’s just one big party including both halves of the couple; there are “theme” showers such as kitchen, lingerie (applicable if couple has lived together and doesn’t really need anything for their home), etc., Italians have showers where there are often 75-150 or more, people in a community/banquet hall, full served lunch with many very expensive gifts being given…there is practically no limit on the kinds of showers you can have which are acceptable now.
This is somewhat different–your friends got together and wanted to fete you.
Since they knew that the wedding was family only, there were no unmet expectations. IF you had had a wedding with 250 guests and half your shower attendees were not invited, that’s tacky. (UNLESS, those attendees were your MIL friends or your coworkers–some remote enough linkage that would explain the lack of invitation.)
I like bridle shower! Hmmmm…saddle soap, helmet, those nice tight jackets they wear. Sounds better than a kitchen shower to me!
And please come back and tell us all about your shower.
I could really use some new tea towels…maybe I should move down under and throw a kitchen tea party for myself.
Then again, it would probably be cheaper to just buy my own.
/I need another wedding shower…my tastes have changed.
Well, where to start?
Since I already knew:
a) the location (my parents place - which I’d sussed out with my mother to use as a venue quite a while before the party would take place)
b) the guests (my mother had forwarded me the list for some addresses she didn’t have). I then passed on this list to the bridesmaid organising the shower.
c) the date (had decided with my mother that it would probably be best if it took place a couple of weekends before the wedding) - I knew it had to be this weekend seeing as the wedding is on the 21st Jan. I just didn’t know it was on Sat or Sun.
… I was still unaware of what type of activities would take place. And I was fine by that.
Well, Cazzle (my trusty matron-of-hour) arrived to take me along to her dress fitting on Sat afternoon, we soon established with each other that it wasn’t so much of a surprise - my other bridesmaid was determined that it should be, despite points A, B & C which clearly indicated that I did know something about it! Personally, I wasn’t that concerned about it being a surprise, it was just nice having someone else organise a party for me - normally I’m the one that does this.
Cazzle and I decided, on the way back to my parents place from the fitting that we should conjure up some sort of reason as to why we’d be going to my parent’s place - since it would seem odd that Cazzle would suddenly say, “Hey, let’s go visit your parents for something to do!”. As it turns out, we didn’t end up needing a reason.
Most of the guests had arrived already, and some hadn’t, so it wasn’t really a case of everyone jumping out from their hiding spots yelling “Surprise!”. But it was nice to see the people (friends, relatives and workmates) who’d made the effort to come along on such short notice - some travelling a bit of distance, especially those from Gippsland (I live on the Mornington Peninsula). One Aunt managed to arrive typically late - an hour and a quarter late!
The games were interesting, some were word games (ie, unscramble the words to reveal marriage-related words, finish the saying), another was “guess the object” - where small items were put in a paperbag and you had to feel the bag to work out what it was, and the last game was a quiz to see who knew how much about the bride and groom. Thankfully, not too many embarressing trivia was revealed there!
An amazing amount of gifts was brought - I was touched by gifts given - many were household related items (some cool kitchen utensils and cleaning bits and pieces), as well as a couple of things for the wedding (a guestbook - very thoughtful, and a garter). The shower finished at about 6pm (had started about 3pm) and afterwards some family and friends took me out to dinner in Mornington, although they made me wear a novelty halo. It was a nice relaxing day, and I was thoroughly exhausted afterwards.
My bridesmaids and my mum had done a fantastic job and I felt so lucky, loved, flattered and honoured to be spoilt this way.
P.S. And not an equine-related product in sight!