Registries

Aug 2012

I thought, when I got married, that I would skip the gifts. Brandon and I weren’t doing any of the usual ceremonies. We weren’t starting a new life from scratch—we already lived together. We weren’t even upgrading. The Ikea plates that we own will do us fine until we leave New York City, at which point we can pass them on and buy a new set when we get there—wherever “there” turns out to be.

But then, you know, gifts! Plus all the more mature stuff Meg says in the book about letting people enjoy contributing. But actually, gifts!

We opted for a honeymoon registry on Wanderable. Were there relatives who were horrified? Sure. The dreaded word “tacky” hung over the whole enterprise. We had awkward conversations about how much money it’s OK to ask for, because even though the idea is that guests give you an experience, you’re still the one putting on the price tag (and subsequently spending the money however you wish). My mother was convinced it was only acceptable to ask for $10 at a time. We cautiously sent around the link including caveats and get-out clauses. Friends and family had already been so helpful during the planning process; so many of the folks we know are broke. Prefer to give stuff? We love stuff! Continue reading Madeline: Gift Horses

Posted in: Planning: Journeys, Registries | 35 Comments »

Aug 2012

Zen: Adventures In Wedding Land

I’ve been a bride-to-be for more than a year, and I’m still not much good at it. You’d think I’d've improved with practice, but the terrain of Wedding Land still reserves a multitude of mysteries and surprises.

Take the gift registry. How do you do a gift registry? I’d never personally encountered one in real life before; back home we give angpow (red packets with money inside) and consider that sorted. But a gift registry would make Cephas’s relatives’ lives easier and so a gift registry we must have.

Cephas and I wandered around a department store wielding an ineffectual scanner, bewildered by the huge range of china, cookware, irons, yoghurt makers—I bet you didn’t know John Lewis sold machines with which you can make your own yoghurt at home, but now you do.

We’re even in the slightly unusual position of actually needing a lot of this stuff, as we don’t live together and will need to set up a new household with plates and forks and all the various other necessaries. That made it a little easier—we would register for things we needed, that we would otherwise have to buy ourselves after moving in together.

But people like buying you things you wouldn’t buy for yourself, Cephas’s mum pointed out. So we should choose something frivolous! Cephas went for a beer glass. (Cephas isn’t great at frivolous. I once emailed him while in the grip of a Youda Sushi Chef craze—if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a gloriously mindless PopCap game where you make imaginary sushi by furiously clicking your mouse—and he replied: “I also am in the grip of a craze, an Armenian devotional music and literature craze. It’s far out.”)

I’ve always wanted an ice cream maker. But I found myself contemplating the only type of ice cream maker on display and wondering if it wouldn’t be better to just take down the model number and check out the price on Amazon. If I’m not willing to pay that price for it myself, wouldn’t it be rude to ask my guests to? Continue reading Zen: Adventures In Wedding Land

Posted in: Planning, Planning: Journeys, Registries | 70 Comments »

Feb 2012

Ask Team Practical: Accomodating Guests

with Alyssa

How do I stop stressing out about where all of my out-of-town friends are going to stay for my wedding? I live in a studio apartment with my fiancé, and while we are very comfortable, we can fit about one guest, and I really don’t want to have anyone on the floor the week of our wedding. All of my bridesmaids and most of my friends (we are in our early twenties so all of our friends are dealing with student loan debt and not-awesome jobs) are flying in. I wish, oh how I wish, I could afford to rent a house for them to all crash in, or have them stay at my place, but I can’t. I know it will be expensive for them to get hotel rooms and I keep stressing about it. How do I stop feeling like this is my burden?

~ Sara Judy

Oh, Sara Judy, I know you, and you are the best kind of friend. You always have our favorite snacks available when we visit, you let us have the window seat on the bus and you always know when we’re having a bad day, don’t you? You are a lovely lovely person. And I say this because I’m about to yell at you for forgetting a basic APW core belief—”Your wedding is not an imposition.”

Your friends are lovely people also, which is why you invited them. They are also grown folks (even if they are young grown folks) and can handle their accommodations themselves. They are coming because they want to come to your wedding, not because the trip is free. You will have enough to do without entertaining guests you are not prepared for, so invite them and then move on to other things. You can be helpful by reserving a block of rooms at a cheaper rate at a nearby hotel (you may be required to give a credit card to hold them, but you should NEVER be charged for this) or suggesting mutual friends’ couches they can surf on, but in the end, it is your friends’ duty to figure our their own accommodations. Think about it! They go places all the time without a block of rooms to help them out. They use Trip Advisor! They use Airbnb. Block of rooms or not, they are going to be just fine (and if they won’t be fine, they don’t have to come).

Of course, I’m assuming your stress is self-inflicted. Now if the stress is coming from the friends in the form of “Oh, I don’t know if I can AFFORD it, WHERE will I stay?!?” comments, well that’s terrible and they should be ashamed. But my advice is still the same. If they can’t come because they have nowhere to stay, that’s very sad, but tell them you understand. Sometimes such comments are sneaky sneakerson ways of getting a free ride; when faced with empathy but little else, you may be surprised how fast they’ll find a place to stay.

P.S. Under no circumstances should someone sleep on your floor during your wedding. Not to be obvious, but for god’s sake, weddings are for getting laid. Continue reading Ask Team Practical: Accomodating Guests

Posted in: Ask Team Practical, Budget, Friends & Relations, Registries | 105 Comments »

Nov 2011

Confessions of a Bridal Registry Consultant

The other week, we were discussing the APW theme that you don’t, in fact, have to Buy All The Things for your wedding (because you already have all the things that matter). Emily, who you’ll remember from her lovely New Orleans elopement and her post on the immigration process and marriage, piped up to say, “As a former bridal registry consultant, I would love to write a post about how the WIC wants you to buy all the things. Or at least register for all the things.” So of course I begged her to write exactly that post. So here, in our ongoing discussion about registries, is an exposé on how the industry wants you to buy it all (Hint #1: Maybe register online? Hint #2: The registry isn’t exactly for you, so it’s still probably worth doing, your own way). Let’s dive in:

Due to the joy of one-year leases and unexpected elopement, Ian and I spent our first year of marriage in the master suite of a three-bedroom apartment with my brother-in-law and one of my husband’s friends. Nesting wasn’t possible as we were essentially living inside the saying, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

So imagine how much fun I thought it would be to work at Bed Bath & Beyond* as a bridal consultant. I’d get to help people build their new homes, help them pick out everything they could possibly ever need or want. For two months, between helping customers and climbing up and down ten-foot ladders, I took classes on housewares. From bakeware to window treatments, I learned it all. My whole life was thread counts, cast iron, and place settings and I loved it. The problem, however, came once I completed my training and became an official registry consultant.

The idea of a bridal consultant is different in practice than it is in theory. In theory I was there to help customers pick out what they wanted. In practice however, consultants are judged by their numbers, and there’s a lot of pressure to build “good” registries, although there’s no real reward for doing so. (Other than the happy feeling of helping someone make good choices. That doesn’t pay the rent though, unfortunately.)

So what makes a good registry? Well…

Our goal for the number of items on your registry is the number of your wedding guests times two. At least. In theory this is to make it easier for your guests to shop, but really the higher the number, the better of a job we’ve done. The total dollar amount of your registry is another number we’re judged on, so we’re always going to steer you towards higher quality items.
We want to register you for fine china. Twelve place settings. Formal and casual if possible, which makes twenty-four place settings. And flatware and glassware and napkins and napkin rings and placemats, also times twelve. (Or twenty-four if we’re lucky.)
A certain percentage of your registry should be from the fine china department for our numbers to be good. If you don’t want china, we will walk you around the room and offer you everything that sparkles until we hit that number. Toasting flutes, crystal vases, cake cutting sets, all wedding themed with hearts and pearls and bows. Some of those things will cost more than what I made in a month; you will probably use them once.
We need you to register for luggage. Even if you don’t want luggage, even if hardly anyone ever buys luggage off a registry, we can’t have a zero in that category. We sell you on luggage by asking you how much you travel. If you say you don’t travel much, we ask how much you plan to travel in the future, and it works every time, because who doesn’t want to go on vacation? Continue reading Confessions of a Bridal Registry Consultant

Posted in: Registries | 135 Comments »

May 2011

Building (and Pondering) A Wedding Registry

Today, as part of our APW and The Kitchn collaboration, we have a fantastic post on thinking about and building a wedding registry. This morning we shared the wedding of Faith Durand, managing editor of The Kitchn, from the APW archives. This afternoon she’s here to share her thoughts on wedding registries. Sometimes I think Faith lives inside my head, because we think over problems in such similar ways (you can read my thoughts on the wedding registry back here). So I’m delighted to bring this thoughtful and super useful post to all of you in the midst of the registry dilemma.

Hello there, Team Practical! Before I dive in, first let me just say that Meg and all of you made up the most encouraging, sane, and inspiring community I found while planning my own wedding three years ago. I was so grateful for this site and this community. So I’m delighted to have a chance to chat about registries in general and practical kitchen resources in particular.

It seems that most brides and bridegrooms I meet these days are vaguely embarrassed by the idea of a wedding registry. I know I was. I was nearly 30 when I got married, and as a professional food writer I already had nearly everything I needed to stock a well-functioning kitchen. Was a registry tacky? Greedy? Too focused on material things during what ought to be a spiritual, deeply personal life moment? My fiancé and I toyed with the idea of jettisoning the registry completely, or asking for money to be given to charity in our names.

I’m glad that we grappled with this question, and that we worked together to make a thoughtful choice. But in the end, we got over our fear of looking like we were greedy or grasping. Because of course we were not, and the reality was that most of our friends and relatives were going to give us a wedding present. We came to the conclusion that grateful acceptance of this generosity was the most gracious option. (Just turn it around for a moment and look at it from the other side; I love giving wedding presents. It’s delightful to give a gift to people I love on such a wonderful day.)

All of our wedding guests were perfectly capable of deciding whether or not they wanted to give us a gift. Some guests who traveled a long way to be there simply gave us the gift of their presence. Other guests gave cash, and friends who didn’t want to give something off the registry gave us other gifts we treasure. One gave us a funny deck of cards; another played a song at the wedding. And those guests who were inclined to help us set up our home had a resource to do so.

This of course is not the only option or the best option for everyone. But our own personal way of making peace with the whole idea was to ask for a small list of things we believed would be long-lasting, beautiful, and helpful in offering hospitality to others in our home.

Meg asked me to offer some practical resources on this process — if you’ve come to the same place as we did in our wedding registry decision, and you want to set up your kitchen to be more functional, more hospitable, and better suited to the pleasures of cooking at home, then these questions may be useful.

A Few Practical Questions for Building a Kitchen Registry

1. What’s broken or worn out in my kitchen? If you’re getting married right out of school and you have no kitchen equipment to speak of, this probably doesn’t apply. But if you’re like me and you have a fairly well-equipped kitchen already, look over your tools. Are your tongs rusted and falling apart? Is your only stockpot thin and flimsy? Does any lack of equipment trip you up when cooking a basic meal? Look for the sore spots of your kitchen; this would be a good time to replace them. (For instance, my wineglasses were a mess — mismatched and chipped. I’m forever grateful to my aunt and my grandmother for upgrading this very important element of my home!)

2. Is there one special tool or piece I’ve been dreaming of? Don’t put a KitchenAid mixer on your registry just because you think you ought to. Continue reading Building (and Pondering) A Wedding Registry

Posted in: How To, Registries | 61 Comments »

Dec 2008

Registry: Telling People About It

As part of our ongoing discussion of registries (see: Part I, Part II, Part III), several of you have asked me to share what language we ended up using when talking about our registry. And I figured - why not? First, let me say, that since my sense of etiquette is firmly set in 1933, I would have been more comfortable not ever mentioning to anyone ever that we were registered anywhere, so as to not look like we were asking for gifts. But, if I've learned anything about wedding planning, it's that you should pick your battles, and the irony of the argument that it was more, achem, Practical to let guests know where we were registered was not lost on me.

So, here is what we said about gifts on our wedding website. It won't be right for all of you, but if it helps just one of you, than I've done my job:
Continue reading Registry: Telling People About It

Posted in: Registries | 36 Comments »