Guests get squeezed
By Never teh BrideAccording to a recent story in the New York Times, wedding guests are feeling the squeeze when it comes to nuptial gift giving.
The ceremony and attendant fetes have become an artfully disguised quid pro quo, with the couple hoping for gifts that will match what they have spent on their nuptials — and stressed-out guests who feel they have no choice but to give in to the pressure or be branded cheap or uncaring.
“We have to stop the madness,” Mr. Farley [a senior editor at Town & Country and author of "Modern Manners: The Thinking Person's Guide to Social Graces"] said. “According to the nitty-gritty rules of social etiquette, guests are not obligated to bring anything to a wedding.”
Peggy Post, author of “Emily Post’s Wedding Etiquette, 5th Edition” (Collins, 2005), outright debunked “the old myth” about giving a wedding gift that is the equivalent of what the couple spent on you for the reception. “It’s about how well you know the couple and their families — and what you can afford,” she said.
THIS is especially true, both experts say, when it comes to deciding what your budget will bear when you are invited to a destination wedding, if you are a member of the wedding party or when multiple showers are involved. “Showers have gotten so huge,” Ms. Post said. “When you get into multiple showers, that’s where you can cut back on the gifts.”
Remember guys and gals, the old ‘cover the cost of the plate’ adage is a myth. Never, ever, ever feel obligated to break the bank when you’re buying wedding gifts.
June 19th, 2006 at 12:54 am
This is nice to know. As a broke grad student whose friends are suddenly rushing to marriage, it’s often difficult to buy very nice gifts and I often find myself looking for gifts in the mid-range: cheap enough so that I don’t bust the bank, but expensive enough so that I don’t seem like a skinflint.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:30 am
As I’ve posted before, we were married 4/30/06, and we paid for our own wedding(most of it, the rest were gifts and most welcome). I estimate a total of $7,000 was spent on our wedding, from reception to clothing to flowers, and we did not expect a damned thing from our guests. Everyone invited (my mother excluded, read my blog) was there to celebrate this wonderful moment in our lives, a life we share with everyone around us, not to give us a gift. One friend is seriously broke but made the 2 1/2 hr trip anyways, giving us a lovely gift basket that included a cross-stitch commemorating our wedding day, chocolates from a fancy store near her and lots of specialty coffees and teas. Lovely!
However, I did go to a wedding in my youth where the bride ‘let it slip’ that it was costing her father (this is how young we were) $50/person (1994). My boyfriend at the time insisted on giving them $100 for our plates. Hmph. That’s their problem if they wanted to have that expensive of a wedding! Ours was, honest to god, $40 maximum.
By the way, NtB, how about a post on seating assignments? I just went to a wedding… my best friend of over 20 years, and we were seated IN THE BACK with 6 people under 25… all single, only one brought a date. We are married and in our mid-thirties. What did we do wrong?!?!?
June 19th, 2006 at 11:30 am
I’ll put seating assignments in the pipeline, Chaeriste
June 19th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
You know, it never occured to me to consider how much I was spending per guest. My ambitions when I got married were to a: end the day married to the man I love and surrounded by the people I loved best, b: throw a hell of a party to celebrate the fact we were getting married, and c: not break the bank into a million pieces. Mission accomplished.
While I was utterly thrilled someone did give us a place setting of the silver we registered for, I was equally touched by the friends who banded together and with less cash than panache put together a thrifty and useful handful of kitchen goodies at the local import store. Then there was my friend who gave me one of his original paintings. It’s a polar bear in the snow. It’s made me smile every day for the last thirteen years, much like the man I married. Who cares what it’s worth to anyone else? It’s priceless to us.
If someone invites me to their wedding looking to make a profit off the investment, they’re in for a sad disappointment. I might try to give them something that has actual meaning despite a very low - or even non-existant - pricetag.
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:22 am
My understanding (from a friend who married a Taiwanese woman earlier this year) is that on some occasions in some other cultures, the relationship between what the wedding costs and what the guests give is made much more explicit. Namely, her parents expected to get back — in cash, in red envelopes — what they spent.
For myself I have been putting off registering, despite my grandmother’s occasional inquiry, partly because my fiancé and I have more stuff than we need as it is, but partly because there are so many social and socioeconomic cues tied up with registering — it almost seems like you’re supposed to register at a certain “class” of store (Williams-Sonoma/Crate and Barrel/Pottery Barn, none of which, I suspect, would be in business without wedding gift registries); but go for too expensive things and your friends resent you; go for Tahrjay and they smirk.
I’m being very wordy here; suffice to say, the idea of choosing what gifts I want people to give me makes me very self-conscious. And I wish ThinkGeek had a wedding registry.
June 23rd, 2006 at 9:28 am
That would be so cool if ThinkGeek had a registry. Have you considered registering with Amazon? Plenty of choices there (yay, books!). Or, if you’re not terribly interested in gifts, with a charity or two? Friends of mine did just that and I thought it was tres tasteful.
June 23rd, 2006 at 12:41 pm
We’ll do it through I Do, which will allow us to register with Amazon.
ThinkGeek does have a wish list option, as it turns out.