I think @Kimstu is referring to an archaic usage, not what modern gender identity conscious people say.
Now you are accusing me of being archaic? Just kidding. But i do refer to babies as “it” sometimes. Especially when I’m not talking to their parents. Especially when they are very young.
But i also told people the sex of my newborns.
I think that’s very common, but the further back you go the older the age of children that people applied that logic to.
I think I would be put off as well if there were gifts of that price range on the registry. At least there are cheaper items as well. I’ve heard of showers / wedding registrations with the cheapest options being hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
Fortunately, they don’t do showers here in Japan and friends who visited bought something appropriate or just showed up.
Yeah, surprisingly, that usage was pretty common even up to WWII or thereabouts.
And it wasn’t always used only for children too young or remote to have an easily identified gender, either. I’ve read a story, for example, where a little boy old enough to wander around in the woods by himself is called “he” and “it” in the same sentence.
My unborn* were called “The Baby” or “My Baby”.
I didn’t like saying “it”
They and them was a few years down the road yet.
(I chose not to know genders)
(*Occasionally I called them parasites, but only a few times🙂)
I’ll drop another etiquette bomb. I hate thank you cards. I think they’re, dumb, wasteful, and unnecessary. This is very true for funerals. These things are a waste of time (especially the grieving) a waste of paper, and money. I bought you a gift, and you told me thank you. That’s all I need or want.
Maybe if it was delivered 'cause the sender is from out of town/state/country. In that case I’d rather call. Alas, no one shares my opinion on this stupid tradition.
It always shocks me when, after I attend a wake, I receive a thank you card. The LAST thing I intended by going to the wake was to create a chore for the bereaved!
When i started sending gifts to people, i realized that some form of acknowledgement is really valuable. I want to know it arrived. A thank you note, an email, a text, a phone call, or a mention when we are together are all fine, but i really do want to know whether it arrived. And an acknowledgement of a gift usually takes the form of saying “thanks”.
Same - I just want to know it got to you. Even if I get a photo of the package sitting on a doorstep, I may not know if that’s your doorstep. Card, phone call, text, email - whatever, I don’t really care. But I have to admit I would think it was strange if someone told me it arrived but didn’t thank me.
I am TERRIBLE about thank you notes. I want to be polite and thoughtful but I always forget.
That being said, I did make a baby blanket for someone on this board and they sent me a beautiful thank note that I’ve kept to this day. So I don’t think they are a total waste.
Any acknowledgement of thanks should be sufficient. Nothing wrong with a handwritten note but I wouldn’t want people to feel obligated to do anymore than just a text.
I would. If you can’t provide what you want for your baby, either (a) scale down your ambitions or (b) don’t have a baby till you can. And if your mother’s already anticipating selling stuff on, then you know what you can do with your list. (I’d send a generic soft toy - it’s not as though the baby knows the difference).
Thank goodness too many of these sorts of formalised/institutionalised accretions on ordinary life events (proposal, bridal/baby showers, gender reveal) haven’t taken hold over here. Yet.
Don’t read too much into it. Most of our leaders can’t find you guys on a map 
Not gonna look for it now, but IIRC, once on this board, someone was laying out a bunch of rules for thank-you notes. How soon, how to word them, what kind of paper, and no ball-point pens. What then, a quill?
Fountain pen, presumably, but I’m a hooked left-hander, so those are difficult for me to use.
??? Wait, what?? I’ll tell you who (besides me) shares your opinion on the superfluousness of writing thankyou letters for a gift or other kind act for which the recipient has already thanked the giver in person: Miss Manners, that’s who!!
Written thankyou notes are just part of a larger tradition of personal correspondence. Aunt Millie sent you a Christmas box or a birthday check, you wrote a note to say thanks. Simple as that.
If Aunt Millie is handing you the loot in person, or calling you on the phone so you can walk her through the process of Venmoing you some birthday $, then of course you thank her nicely at the time in your own personal dulcet voice. Miss Manners is not gonna come after you to dun you for a written letter on top of that.
(Wedding gifts are traditionally acknowledged with letters of thanks because wedding gifts were typically delivered by mail or retailer. Also, wedding gifts are typically arriving in quantity during wedding-prep chaos, so a system of written replies is helpful for keeping track of which item is from whom and ensuring nothing got list in the shuffle.)
There are many circumstances in which it’s a very nice gesture to send heartfelt written thanks in addition to verbal thanks. Like, your child’s teacher this year somehow inspired them to love reading for the first time and you want to go on record stating what a lifechanging boon it’s been. Or, the passersby who gave you a lift home after the car accident and you feel you were too shook up at the time to express your appreciation as you wanted to. Etc.
But there are very few situations in which etiquette actually REQUIRES that verbal thanks must be supplemented by written ones. Possibly if you’re invited to receive a medal at the White House or something; I’d have to look that up.
(This is exactly why, by the way, it’s not really adequate to have only a purely “descriptivist” approach to etiquette customs that reduces them to the tautology of declaring that whatever is generally expected is by definition polite, and whatever is not generally expected is by definition rude. Conventional expectation of social customs isn’t a simple binary where we all know and agree what is Done and what is Not Done. Basic ethical principles ultimately have to be invoked so we can understand and explain our choices about the evolution of customs.)
Another example of the “excessive written thankyou convention” is the fairly recent development of bridal couples sending grateful notes to guests just for coming to the wedding. This too, unsurprisingly, is not Miss Manners-mandated.
Hosts are not required to thank their guests in writing just for having accepted their hospitality. (Nor are wedding guests required to send a bread-and-butter letter after attending the wedding. Although it is often a nice gesture: especially if you had a bit too good of a time at the event, IYKWIM, and would like to attempt a little subsequent damage control on the hosts’ perception of you.)
It’s a mystery to me how that “thanks for attending our wedding”-letter practice got started. Cynical people have opined that it’s meant to provide a subtle nudge to remind any guests who haven’t given a wedding present yet that, um, still one step left to complete, folks! But I would like to think better of the wedding industry than that, natch. 
I’m not sure what the “thank you for attending our wedding” notes you are referring to looked like. But I might know where they came from. For as long as I can remember , printed " Thank You" cards with a photo enclosed were A Thing. Even in ethnic groups where nobody ever heard of a wrapped wedding gift and everyone was thanked immediately as they handed their envelope to the couple. * And of course, these pre-printed cards said something to the effect of "Thank you for sharing our special day with us " and you would usually add “Thank you for your very generous gift” or “extremely generous gift”. And you had to send it to everyone, even if someone somehow didn’t give you a gift because it would cause a war if someone was Left Out , even though they probably tossed the card and the photo after looking at it once.
In the last 10 or 15 years, it’s changed from an enclosed photo to more of a photo postcard , with a longer message on the back , like
Thank you for sharing in our joy on our special day. We were so happy that you could be with us to celebrate the first day of the rest of our lives together, and we sincerely thank you for your support and love.
There’s no room to add an individual message and even if there was, the card isn’t suitable to write on. Sometimes they add something about a gift ( thank you for your support , love and generous gift) but not always.
* I never saw a wrapped wedding gift until my own wedding. We had two separate receptions with about 400 guests. One wrapped gift.
Ooh, nice catch. That wording does indeed remind me of some of the “thanks for attending our wedding” notes I’ve received. Although I can testify that at least some bridal couples think they’re supposed to write such notes by hand: yikes, like they aren’t drowning in wedding-related chores already!
Yup, this practice that I’ve never seen a word breathed about in any 20th-century classic etiquette book, including those (and their 21st-century successors) by Miss Manners, is apparently now considered “essential” in at least some parts of the wedding industry:
I mean, this is an illustration of how far divorced (heh, no pun intended) the fancy special-occasion events like weddings have become from the ordinary social exercise of hospitality in American culture.
Back in the day, many people at all socioeconomic levels routinely hosted and/or co-organized festive events that included eating and dancing and what-not, along the lines of typical wedding reception formats. If you were the sort of people that Emily Post used to illustrate with the character “Mrs. Worldly Gilding”, you gave debutante balls and grand dinners and so on in your elegant town house, with a hired orchestra supplying the music in your ballroom. If you were the sort of people whose daughter worked as the Gildings’ second housemaid, for example, your neighborhood and/or immigrant community would have had some kind of social hall where community leaders and the Ladies’ Auxiliary organized dances, perhaps to mark one of the traditional calendar festivals of the old country.
Either way, and for everyone in between, you understood that you as the hosts are supposed to invite the guests, and you as the hosts have some obligations to look after the comfort and entertainment of the guests, but there is no need for you to formally thank your guests with a sort of “reverse bread-and-butter letter” for having deigned to accept your generous hospitality. That would have come across as so bass-ackwards as to seem possibly sarcastic in intent, IMHO. So naturally they would never have issued such thanks to wedding guests, either.
But it totally makes sense in the situations you describe, where wedding receptions include the additional ritual of giving a monetary present to the bride and groom in person, and the “thank you for sharing our special day” cards are a conventional acknowledgement of that.
Nowadays, though, so many people engage in so little seriously organized large-scale partygiving that they are pretty much willing to believe whatever the wedding industry tells them about what is “essential” for wedding hosts to do. A wedding is now widely perceived as a special-occasion law unto itself, AFAICT; it doesn’t need to make any sense in terms of recognized patterns of social hospitality.
So even if your social circle doesn’t do the envelopes-at-the-wedding thing, and your guests already sent you your wedding presents separately and you already sent individual thank-you notes for them, never mind: still gotta send all the guests a “thank you for sharing our special day” card! 