Wedding Gift Registry

The Wedding Gift Registry

While the very existence of this phenomenon may be news to you, the wedding registry is your ticket to receive lots of great stuff at the best price ever: free! It is also your chance to instantly outfit your new home, kitchen and dining room table with household essentials of a higher quality than you and your bride may be able to afford yourselves.

A wedding registry is in the simplest terms a place where bride and groom register or list items they would like to receive as wedding gifts.  Guests go to the wedding registry to choose a gift for the two of you which they can be confident you will appreciate.  In the yesteryear of the dim and hazy past, wedding registries were often confined to gift stores and department stores and a guest had to trundle off in person to the store to poke around and select a gift for you.  Today, to everyone’s appreciation, they are 99% online.  Target, K-Mart, Crate & Barrell, Macy’s, Neiman’s, you name it, all have online wedding registries and your guests can point, click, pay and send the gift with just a few movements of the mouse in a matter of minutes.

The way you make these dreamy selections is a breeze too.  You and your bride wander around the store and scan the bar codes of the items you want into a scanner, and presto! You’ve got your wish list!  This process has the potential of resulting in the biggest load of impressive goodies you will ever receive in your life.  Choose wisely and don’t go overboard.  Sure, maybe you’d like that $5,000 sterling and ivory bar set, but choosing it and adding it to your registry for all of the wedding guests to see may not be the smartest thing you ever did in your life. Your choices will telegraph messages about you and your values to the people most important to you, and this is something you should keep in mind. Try to be thoughtful and somewhat practical and resist the temptation to impulsively go overboard at the sight of all those fine items that make you drool, as in, say, the $40,000 billiard table at Neiman’s or the Limoges bone china at Tiffany’s that costs $3,000 a place setting. Unless your last name is Rockefeller or Vanderbilt, such choices would not only be in bad taste, but also create the impression you’ve lost your mind.

Once the wedding invitations go out, the gifts will start to arrive, so it won’t be long before lots of these goodies start showing up at your bride’s place or her parents’ home with your names (yes, yours!) on them.  Life as a groom is good! Enjoy!