The wedding is in August. We’ve got most everything covered: venue, caterer, photographer, officiant, music, rings, invitations. Still working on flowers and cake. We plan a fun, casual wedding with good food and plentiful libations of the beer and wine variety.
Registering For Gifts: We’re both older (my betrothed is 38) so we don’t need household basics. We’d like to get some new furniture or save for a trip. Are there any sites that anyone would recommend where we can bundle donations for larger items? I have some reservations about the appropriateness of this method but could be easily swayed. We also will have a couple suggested charities if anyone wants to donate in our names. Related question: Any places with registries that have unusual items available? I know about Archie McPhee, but would love to hear about any others.
Wedding Favors: What have people done for these? Something whimsical/fun/atypical would be best (we seriously considered whoopee cushions embossed with "I had a gas at J&D’s wedding, we may still do that).
Sending Invites: We have slightly different ideas about what to do. She wants to hand address them, I want to get some clear labels and print them with a nice font (using mail merge of course). Any comments on either method?
Kids: We’re all for them and hope a lot show up (our attendants are my nephew and her niece, both 10). Any thoughts on hiring some sort of (non-clown) entertainer to keep them happy? Ages should range from 1-ish to 14-ish (after that, they are de facto adults as far as I’m concerned).
Finally: Any suggestions to make life easier, ensure our guests have a good time, or make it a memorable event (my nude sky diver officiant idea was already nixed, so don’t worry about that one ).
In the US today if you have more than one store you are required by law to have a bridal registry. My cousin was registered with home depot among other places.
Wedding favors are a complete waste of money. You will spend a fair amount on giving every guest some cheap crap that they really don’t want and will be a hassle to keep track of during the evening, all the women have tiny evening purses and guys just have pants and a jacket. Skip them - nobody looks back on weddings they have attended and thought about the nice favors. They will think of the great setting, the nice ceremony, the great food, the fun time they had dancing, the chance to see family members that you would not see otherwise. There are so many better things to spend the favor money on that will make people have a good time. If you must, my wife suggests combining the placeholders with a nice little frame and card inside the frame commemorating the wedding.
Hand addressing the invitations is always classy but it is a lot of work. I have no strong feelings here.
Kids at weddings are great fun–some of my favourite wedding memories are of attending as a kid, and one of my favourite memories is of my husband keeping three wee flower girls entertained at his cousin’s wedding. Great weddings seem, to me, to have everyone there having a good time, from age 8 to 80.
I don’t care if my invitation is hand-written or a computer label, and I don’t care about wedding favours. I just want to see people I care about exchange vows, take lots of pictures, and dance and socialise for the rest of the day/evening.
By “donations” do you mean wedding gifts? It’s completely inappropriate to suggest that people “donate” money so you can buy anything even if you want to get furniture or take a trip. And it’s also completely inappropriate to suggest that people contribute to a charity on your behalf.
But it is extremely common to do such things what else is a bridal registry but suggestions for donation? It is also relatively common to do pretty much exactly what is being proposed. I have been to weddings where the registry is pitching in for the honeymoon. It is not really different from getting a small part of the overall china set. If I am getting someone a gift I would like it to be something that is wanted and appreciated registries are great for that.
Whether or not people use a wedding registry to solicit contributions for the honeymoon trip doesn’t make it right. If people such as the OP are old enough and settled enough not to need the usual household basics, they can simply tell anyone who asks that they don’t need anything and the presence of the guest at the wedding is enough of a gift.
I’m going to have to ask for a cite for this, not because I doubt your veracity, but because my sanity’s defense mechanisms require me to believe that’s not true until proven otherwise. There is actually a law that forces stores to have bridal registries? What possible grounds could any government have to regulate this?
If true, this is…not the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, but it certainly wins the day, and the week. The month may still be up for grabs. Legislation of bridal registries…yeesh.
Two friends of mine are dinosaur freaks. When they got married, instead of bride and groom figures on top of the wedding cake, they put two dinosaur figures there. For their wedding favors, they gave each person a small King Kong or Godzilla toy which walked and spit sparks. These can be obtained from novelty catalogs for a few dollars.
Even though there are some people who ask guests to give money as presents, there are a lot of other people who are offended by that. Look at it this way: The original idea of wedding presents was that the couple are young and just moved out of their parents’ house, so they own nothing of common household items. By giving then household items, the (mostly older) guests are providing them with the things that they need to start their own household. If they don’t need such items, then many guests’ reaction will be to say, “Why do they need any presents then?”’ It’s O.K. to tell people that you aren’t registered anywhere and hope that many of them will give you money instead. Some people will be offended though if you tell them that only money is acceptable though or that they should bundle gifts.
You certainly have a point about the couple not really needing things to start a household. However, in the US today gifts are given to people getting married and all things considered it is best all around if the gifts are what the couple wants. If they don’t let people know ahead of time they will get calls and emails asking where they are registered. It is easier all around if they decide what they want ahead of time. I don’t know about you but I would feel like a total heal if I did not get a gift for a wedding that I attended.
Apparently, there is a Chinese tradition of using a bunch of little red envelopes for gift giving. The idea is to make the gift anonymous, so that it truly comes from the heart. People can put in money, or a note with words of wisdom, or nothing at all. We tried this at our wedding to moderate funness. You can find bundles of the envelops at any well-stocked Asian food store.
A few random thoughts:
congrats!
No matter what you say, some people will want to give you a gift. To help these people register at some place like Bed Bath and Things, or Linens and Beyond.
Yes you have everything, but register for new sheets or towels or something.
Feel free to register at other places. Home Despot, or the gun shop, or whatever.
Wedding favors? Never seen them. I would skip this.
Hand address the invites. Yeah it is a pain.
Kids? [hijack] When my son was 6 months old we were invited to a wedding at Malibu lake. My son was the hit of the reception. He smiled at everyone as they passed him from person to person. In less than a month he is getting married at the very same place. [/hijack] Make sure there are drinks for the kids (very few 6 year olds drink single malt scotch) and things for them to do, even it is only run around with the decorations.
My wrist still hurts remembering the work of hand adressing those 300 envelopes… and this was SiL’s idea of “a small wedding.”
For women’s favors, we bought a special kind of candy that’s made only in her home town, lace-edged hankies and lengths of red tape (red being the color of our homeland but not of hers). Stick some candy into a hanky, tie with the ribbon. For guys’ favors, these things bought directly from the factory which, being both a letter opener and a bottle opener, turned every male in the room into a 2yo when given out. 'twas pretty funny, seeing the hospital manager (in his 60s), a consul (late 50s) and other similarly-serious gentlemen as they kept turning the things around, exclaiming “but it’s a letter opener too!” “but it’s a bottle opener as well!” It was the Swiss Army Knife of wedding gizmos, I swear.
A very good friend of mine is a home brewer, what they did as a wedding favor was to buy the custom M&Ms in the wedding colors with his and her names on the candies and they packaged them in the classic small beer bottle, and capped them. I cant remember what was on the label but in addition to names and date there was some cute picture. The flowers on the tables were also in wine bottles wrapped in silver mylar gift bags tied off with ribbons in the wedding colors, and very good quality artificial flowers in the wedding colors, and a camera for people to take random pictures. We were encouraged heartily to take home the floral arrangements, I scored like 3 of them, and a random 6 foot segment of matching swag from the buffet.
Very odd buffet - this is the first wedding reception I was ever at that had a very lovely baked huge slab of cod in a lemon butter - these sides of cod were huge, easily 14 to 18 inches long, an inch and a half thick and ranging from 4 to 6 inches wide. They were obviously a special order item because I havent seen cod that size in a grocery store in years. They also had a killer lasagne with both beef and italian sausage, and some sort of stuffed vegan portobello parmigian. I happen to know they ordered the cod especially for me as max knows it is my favorite thing to eat [and it is fairly diatetic for people who dont want the heavier italian dishes]
As an aside, as a wedding gift for a very good friend, I made her a veil. Since I have a bin of seed pearls of different colors and sizes [I do opus angolorum - picked it up when I was very active in the SCA] so it was a full sized 2 layer veil with the edge hand applied in seed pearls, and I got together with her seamstress and the headpiece had trim that matched her dress. I also pearled several lace patches [where the loop and button are for holding the train out of the way, and the one with the finger loop to hold the train while dancing]
I’d skip the favors personally. Just more junk to haul around and throw in a drawer to be forgotten. That whoopee cushion thing is incredibly astoundingly tacky. Unless you and all your friends are low-brow prop comedians, I’d skip it. Maybe it’s your kind of humor … I’d not want everyone to associate my wedding with tacky junior-high pranks and farts. YMMV.
I think hand-addressed envelopes are nicer than mailing labels. I find those kind of tacky, like mass-produced junk mail. Although practically they are of course easier and I suppose most people won’t notice. Hand-addressed is a lot nicer though. How many people are you inviting? If it’s 150 or less I’d hand-write them. I hand-address about 300 Christmas cards for my office each year and it doesn’t take all that long.
I don’t think you want to classify gifts as “donations” of any kind. And it’s bad form to request that anyone give any kind of specific gift that you might have the most want or need for, except in the form of your signing up at a registry. Registries exist for the purpose of helping people choose something you’d like when they can’t think of anything on their own. If there is an actual registry-type service where you can register for a honeymoon and people can give gifts of money toward it, that’s okay; but you must not tell people that you don’t want any “stuff” because you’re all set at home so they can just give you money instead for your honeymoon. Wanting to donate to charity is also nice, but you should just do it with any money you happen to receive as gifts that you want to donate, not ask people to donate on your behalf.
I used to think kids didn’t usually belong at weddings but I’ve changed my mind. I like them there. Weddings are supposed to be where you show your family that you’ve chosen this other person to join them, of all the people in the world. So what if some baby cries during the ceremony? If the mom/dad has common sense and doesn’t let it go on for too long, big deal. If mom/dad are too stupid to understand this, won’t it be fun to tease them later on about it? If the kid’s not screaming in the front row I don’t think it’s all that important in the grand scheme of things. And children at receptions are nice: it’s a party so who cares if they’re a little loud and they generally have cute outfits on. It’s great that you’re thinking of hiring some kind of entertainment: how about a magician?
If you’re registered at Archie McPhee you already have a much more interesting wedding than we had.
We were supposed to get married on the beach, but that ONE day, it rained. Grrr. So our wedding had a beach theme. we collected a gazillion large shells to decorate with. we made driftwood and shell centerpieces (hotglued). We drew up our own maps for the wedding, and chose a simple font and a relatively simple format for the invitations. I think we hand-addressed all the invites, but I’m not sure.
When we were looking at wedding sites, we found one that was set for around Halloween. It had a Halloween theme – orange and black decorations, ceramic jack-o-lantern centerpieces, Halloween candy bags at each place as gift favors. Sounds right up your alley.
You might give out such gift bags as favors yourself – you could fill them with a lot of weird McPhee-esque gifts. Since it’s a wedding, you ought to get the higher quality gags. If you get the imprinted whoopee cushions, make sure they’re the self-refilling kind. People notice little touches like that.
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[/hijack] Make sure there are drinks for the kids (very few 6 year olds drink single malt scotch) and things for them to do, even it is only run around with the decorations.