Deborah and I always planned on registering for wedding gifts. I’ve never felt guilty asking people to buy us gifts because I myself have never purchased a wedding gift for a friend and thought, “gee, I can’t believe I have to do this. How rude!” However, I feel guilty asking our poor starving-artist-currently-in-graduate-school friends to buy us things. And yet, we also have relatives and friends of the family who are much better off than our barely scraping by peers, and I know the WASP inside of those guests would bring us a gift even if we didn’t register.
Creating a wedding registry prevents us from receiving an onslaught of floral wall art crochet thingamabobs that we have never wanted. And, though the inner Martha Stewart in me cringes to say this, we have really crappy stuff. Truly. Our pots and pans are hand-me-downs from friends or family. I think we have six different silverware sets, none of them complete and all of them weird looking. Our cooking utensils came in a 25 piece box I bought from Big Lots for $5.99. Sure, they work for the moment, but I’ve already melted quite a few handles and probably consumed a fair amount of plastic and aluminium.
So, for us, deciding to register wasn’t the problem. It was deciding where and what to register for that caused us the most grief. Even though I never cringe at the idea of buying a couple a lovely wedding gift, I have always secretly judged the people that register for the super expensive china place settings that they will never really use. I’m sorry, if you can’t afford to throw an expensive dinner party, why are you registering for $300 a place setting china?! When and where will you ever have a dinner party for twelve in your tiny one bedroom apartment?! And furthermore, where the heck will you store it?
Where would the deluxe waffle-maker/panini press go? Where would the fancy mixer go? Our lack of kitchen counter space keep us grounded in reality. Photo by Me.
We wanted a practical wedding registry, which meant not a completely traditional one. We thought about what we needed and what we didn’t. I always find that the best advice comes from those who have already ‘done,’ so I asked our engaged friends what they registered for and our married friends what they *wish* they had registered for.
- One recently married couple told us not to register for full sets of pots and pans. The sets are so expensive, and they only use a few of them. The pre-packaged idea seems so nice, but in reality it just contains a lot of things that will never be used and will sit collecting dust. It is better to register individually for the pieces you know you will really use.
- My father told me to make sure we registered for a hand-held mixer– you know the kind with two prongs that you can make mashed potatoes with.
- Everyone and their mother (seriously, a friends’ mother chimed in via facebook) told us to get a Kitchen Aid Mixer, which we are definitely not doing. We don’t have the counter space, and I make cakes from a box. We decided that if we got to the place in our lives where we were cooking and baking enough to warrant a Kitchen Aid Mixer, then we could just buy it ourselves.
- Along those lines, I was reminded to plan for now, not necessarily the future. This is the advice we really took to heart. Ideally, we would love to have fun gadgets and gizmos for the kitchen (Deborah loves her some waffles), but we have no counter space and no storage space. So the waffle maker just wasn’t smart. Besides, we would use a waffle maker once every month, and that is being fairly optimistic about it. The planning for now advice helped us keep the registry ‘in check’ so to speak. Did we have room for this? Were we really going to use item X or were we just hoping to eventually use it?
- List things you want as a couple, not things you are ‘supposed’ to register for. We aren’t getting fancy china. We are getting nice wine glasses because we drink a lot of wine. We opted out of the nice coffee maker and went with a french press instead. We are going to register for board games because we love them.
Remember: These are things that you will be living with for a long long time! So make sure they really are things you want and not something that will be donated to Goodwill the next time you move. If we registered for what everyone told us to, we would have a giant mixer sized paperweight!
heck yeah for registering for board games! we did the same thing!!!
Totally agree that you should register for what you actually want and need and try not to get caught up in the tradition of ‘supposed to’. Non-traditional options like fun experiential stuff can certainly have their perks and create memories that last a lot longer than a set of sheets will.
damn your registry i am getting you floral wall art instead!
kidding but also kinda not…