What a great idea! Sounds like a lot of fun. I like giving baby board books for showers and you could find a couple of well thought out ones for $20.
The drizzle part is very clever.
I’m with you, but the fact they they had inexpensive stuff on their list makes it okay. Sounds like the circle they run in goes for this kind of thing.
Please tell me they didn’t/aren’t going to have a gender-reveal party.
Buy them something off the list but buy it secondhand.
I think that is gauche.
No, that would be lefthand, not secondhand.
In case anybody’s interested in an Official Etiquette Ruling-type opinion for purposes of comparison, Miss Manners still doesn’t approve of gift registries.
The fundamental etiquette principle that it’s not gracious for adults to openly expect other people to give them presents is not altered by the ongoing evolution of technology and culture. Measured against that principle, the use of gift registries is always going to come across as a little bit rude. It’s just that we no longer notice the built-in entitlement so much unless the recipient seems to be expecting what we consider an unreasonable amount of expenditure, as in the OP’s example.
Now, that said: nonetheless, like pretty much everybody else, I often buy from the registry list when one is provided. I consider the whole concept at most a very minor infraction of good taste, so not worth even an eyeroll most of the time. And that’s not even counting the fact that some gift-givers sincerely love the registry concept, because they hate the figuring-out-what-to-gift process, so they are solidly anti-Miss-Manners on this issue. (Of course, as Miss Manners recognizes, actually saying or hinting to the recipient that you think gift registries are a bit rude would be far ruder than the announcement of the registry itself, so that’s off the table no matter how much you loathe registries.)
But I have to admit that nothing I have ever bought from a registry, no matter how politely the recipient thanked me for it or how useful they found the item, has ever warmed my heart anything like those cherished occasions when a recipient has turned out to really love a present that I actually discovered for them using my very own brain.
However, Miss Manners (along with mjmartin and others in this thread) have a valid point about the “in for a penny, in for a pound” aspect. If we are going to consider the recipient-selected gift registry to be at all appropriate as an approach to gift-giving in modern civilized society, we need to acknowledge that the recipient is within their rights to put any items they want on it.
Some people don’t want those suggestions to be too pricey because it’s a lot to spend, while others don’t want them to be too inexpensive because they don’t want to seem “cheap”. And many people are confused about what’s the “right” amount to spend. In other words, registry users are gradually but surely reinventing the whole problem of too much uncertainty in gift selection, so, thanks for that. 
TL;DR: Anyway, as long as everybody involved bears in mind the basic rule that gifts are never mandatory, and it’s seriously rude to complain about people not giving you the gifts you wanted (or even any gift at all), nobody is going to have any serious run-ins with the Civility Police.
Agree with both of you. After the child is born I’d make a donation to a food bank where they live in his/her name.
Very retro chic! For your mulling-over pleasure, here are various traditional etiquette aspects of gift showers that have got a bit run over in the march of progress:
- Bridal and baby showers were traditionally focused on precisely this “drizzle” sort of small contributions to the newly expanding household. A larger gift might be given as the actual wedding present or at the baby’s birth. But a shower present was supposed to be just something fun and/or practical on a smaller scale, not an opportunity for ostentatiously lavish gifting.
- Because of the more casual nature of shower gifts, there were never any registries involved for them. Even bridal couples who put together a registry list with suggestions for their wedding presents wouldn’t have dreamed of making one for a bridal shower. That would be like, I don’t know, expecting all your friends to doll up in tuxedos and diamonds to go out to McDonalds.
- Shower invitations could never be issued by either the recipients themselves or their immediate families. Since the couple’s families were nominally the ones responsible for helping them establish their new or newly expanding household, it would have looked shiftless and greedy for a close relative to start, in essence, passing the hat for contributions from others.
- In keeping with that personal-responsibility mindset, a first-time bride or expectant mother got ONE shower, and that was it. Not just for that wedding or baby, mind you, but for all subsequent efforts along the same lines. The first time you were furnishing a marital house, or a nursery, your friends rallied round with the cigarette lighters and dishtowels and cute underwear in grownup or baby sizes, as appropriate. The next time, if there was a next time, you were expected to already have all that shit. Once you were successfully launched vis-a-vis the material requirements of marriage and/or parenthood, it was assumed that you would subsequently maintain them by your own efforts.
The shower ship has pretty much sailed as far as all those older-fashioned expectations are concerned, but it will be interesting to see if the reinvention of some of them in the form of the “drizzle” turns out to have legs, culture-wise.
I’ve never been to a shower that was held by the recipiant. My son and his SO are being given a shower by her sister in law.
You’re right, come to think of it; that traditional prohibition is still more or less in force.
On the “drizzle” theme, friends of mine a while ago had a “Nothing New” shower for their first baby. You could make a gift or thrift a gift or hand something down from your own kid’s outgrown stash, and a “registry” list of specific item types was available to indicate their needs and preferences, but buying new was not allowed!
I went absolutely to town with the Reduce-Reuse-Recycle theme and ended up sewing them a bunch of stuff sourced entirely from my existing fabric stash and rag bag. Nursing pads, baby bibs, baby washcloths, nursing poncho, receiving blankets, you name it, it’s amazing what you can put together from old clothing items, quilting cottons, and the like.
(I am proudest of the infant scratch mitts made of an old red T-shirt with wristbands from the ribbing of some old black dress socks, on which I embroidered the Everlast logo in yellow so they look like little boxing gloves. Try to find that on your Toys R Us registry, I don’t think. )
Y’all do realize gift registry has been around forever.
You went the store picked out your China pattern, next place your silverware pattern, next the linen place.
When baby was due you went to the baby shops picked out layettes.
It’s not a new concept. It’s just online now.
OP, buy them what you want. Send a flower arrangement the day of the shower. Buy them a meal subscription for the 3 mos after the birth.
Or send a card of congrats.
You are not held to a fire to buy anything.
I’m not so sure that’s a reinvention of old expectations- every “sprinkle” or “drizzle” I’ve heard about has been for a second or third child where there was a full-on shower for the first.
Registries weren’t common for either weddings or babies where and when I was young - but there was a substitute. Which was that people asked the couple’s mothers for colors and/or the theme. ( Which probably worked fine with normal people, but not so much when my mother told people my bedroom would be peach and I ended up with peach sheets and peach curtains and a peach comforter , etc. even though I didn’t like that color. My mother should have known that - but she liked it )
Registries were common for weddings, but not baby showers, in my social circles when i and my friends were doing those things.
As long as there’s a range, down to literally small things like a Sophie and baby blankets, it’s all good.
I’m thrilled to not have to go shopping and figure out what to buy people just to pick something that winds up being a stupid thing they don’t actually want and will keep for a few years just to offload because it’s become clutter.
No, they didn’t have A gender-reveal party. They had THREE! (One each for her divorced parents and 1 for my sister.)
You’re right. I hadn’t noticed that. Even if it were held at the couples’ home, I would have expected the invite to have come from a sibling/friend/etc. But it was from the mom-to-be.
Apparently the neighborhood they wanted to live in (school districts?) in one of the biggest cities in Texas. I guess small is a relative term. As I understand it, a mid-50s ranch, in which the garage has been converted into a bedroom, and the back yard is entirely in-ground pool. With a poolhouse that I understand the bride’s mom is likely to move into to provide childcare. (Not sure if they will both continue their 60-70 hr/week work schedules…)
Oh yeah - the gift we are giving was NOT on the registry. We are horrible people!
Heres the deal. Amazon and Target give you 10% off everything on your registry if you buy it yourself at the end. So what modern parents do is just make their shopping list, and then 6 or 8 weeks before the baby comes, they order everything else. They are just letting you see their list. It’s by far the easiest way to organize the stuff you need.
And lots of people want a second set of sone stuff for grandma’s house. A pack n play and high chair already set up over there helps a lot.
ETA: Big items are understood to be there mostly for the 10%, or for say, the whole office to go in on.
Yeah, to my mind, a gift is something you want to give, not something you have to give. And while a registry can be helpful, it’s not a binding contract. My grandnephews got afghans that I designed specifically for them. I’m pretty sure my niece’s wedding present was an afghan also - it’s been a while. In fact, if I don’t know the recipient well enough to know what they’d like, maybe there’s no reason for them to be inviting me to any event.
Or maybe I’m just an old grouch.
Now Beck, you do know that that kind of sweeping historical assertion is like a red rag to a bull around here, right? Rabbit hole ACTIVATED.
No, what’s been around “forever”, or at least since the rise of mercantilism in western societies, is some form of the bridal trousseau or “hope chest”. That is, for centuries young women themselves have collected and created a stockpile of stuff that they expect to use in their future married households. (Such stuff, if marked with names, initials or monograms, used the bride’s maiden surname, because the process started long before she had any definite info about what her married surname would be.)
And yes, for affluent people at least since the late 19th century, part of that process was having selected patterns of china, silver, crystal, linens etc. supplied by some local retailer(s). (Or if you were really affluent, the retailer didn’t need to be local; you could live in Podunkus but still get your trousseau homewares from some fancy store in New York or Philadelphia. Or, for that matter, London or Paris.) That wasn’t just for your pre-marriage years, either: you kept your registered choice of pattern(s) throughout your life, or at least as long as you had dealings with the retailer(s) in question, so you could replace or add on items as desired.
And yes, it was always possible for the mother of the bride to mention the name of the retailer to prospective wedding guests demanding to know what they should give the bridal couple. (Less gracious mothers of the bride, or even brides themselves, might thrust that information on prospective guests without waiting to be asked, but that was a social solecism.) Any friend or acquaintance who wanted to give a gift could go to that retailer (or just write to them) and pay for some chunk of trousseau goods to be sent to the bride with their congratulatory message.
But there was no formal trousseau inventory management system like a modern registry, either for the chosen pattern(s) at a particular retailer or for gifts in general. A hundred years ago, etiquette authority Emily Post was acknowledging the statistical inevitability of a bride’s sometimes ending up with something like “twenty-two salt cellars and sixteen silver trays when she has no pepper-pots or coffee spoons or platters or vegetable dishes”.
The modern inventory-management wedding registry got going in the second quarter of the 20th century or thereabouts, and really took off after WWII. However, it’s only been in the last couple-three decades that it’s been considered even remotely acceptable to announce your gift registry info to your prospective guests unsolicited. That is never gonna be completely not-rude, because of the violation of the abovementioned fundamental principle against explicitly soliciting presents. But it’s nonetheless pretty customary nowadays.
And yes, doreen and puzzlegal are right that the baby registry is a relative newcomer compared to the wedding registry. The idea that people would be expected to contribute registry items as shower gifts for either weddings or babies, as I noted above, was pretty much unheard of before the last few decades. Registries were for “major” presents and showers were for small ones, although the modern mass-retailer trend of including all sorts of humbler houseware items in a gift registry has produced a certain amount of convergence.
And furthermore in the “reinventing the wheel” category: Turns out that one of the current hot trends in gift registry use is trying to figure out ways to steer guests away from buying any specific material gift at all, in favor of just giving the recipient(s) some money. That, of course, was always a standard alternative in the days before gift registries were common. (If wedding presents were on display before or at the wedding, checks could be displayed right along with them, though good taste required covering up the actual amount specified and simply showing the donor’s name.)
Says who?
If society has moved on from one way of doing things and now the overwhelming majority of people do it a new way, to the point where the majority of people think you’re being rude if you do things the old way - then the “fundamental etiquette principles” HAVE changed.