Wedding gift list options

Time for a change of pace on the blog, and some sound advice by guest blog­ger Andrew Green from the award win­ning buyourhoneymoon.com

From din­ner set­tings to hon­ey­moon accounts: options for your wed­ding gift list

You wouldn’t want any of your guests to feel in any way oblig­ated to get you a gift, but it’s a pretty safe bet that most of them will buy you a present any­way. Your guests will want to con­tribute to your future hap­pi­ness as a cou­ple, to par­tic­i­pate in the cel­e­bra­tion of your wed­ding, and many will want to buy you a gift as a token of their love.

A wed­ding list is sim­ply a way to indi­cate your gift pref­er­ences, to avoid con­fu­sion or dupli­ca­tion — the old joke of a dozen assorted toast­ers! — and also to avoid the like­li­hood of being pre­sented with gifts you actively dis­like. You’d undoubt­edly appre­ci­ate any­thing your friends and fam­ily would be gen­er­ous enough to give you, but his-n-hers horse brasses are sure to lan­guish in a cup­board, no mat­ter how thought­fully they were chosen.

Tra­di­tional wed­ding gift list

Tra­di­tion­ally, wed­ding gifts were to help new­ly­weds estab­lish their first home together, and the first bridal reg­istry was estab­lished in 1924 by the Mar­shall Field’s depart­ment store in Chicago to help coor­di­nate din­ner ser­vice pat­terns. Even now, by far the most pop­u­lar wed­ding list choice is to hold a reg­istry with a big depart­ment store such as John Lewis or Deben­hams.

If you’re set­ting up home, this can be a clear win­ner. Your guests will be com­fort­able and famil­iar with your choice — and as well as the var­i­ous house­wares you need, you get an afternoon’s fun with a zap­per gun. Retail ther­apy with­out the shopper’s remorse, this alone can be a very wel­come escape from the stresses of wed­ding planning.

It’s not just the big depart­ment stores that offer wed­ding list ser­vices. Smaller bou­tiques and spe­cial­ist online ser­vices such as The Wine Wed­ding List offer wed­ding reg­istries for cou­ples with par­tic­u­lar shared interests.

Alter­na­tive wed­ding gift list ideas

But what if the things you want most aren’t all to be found in the same store? There’s noth­ing to stop you from reg­is­ter­ing with as many dif­fer­ent stores as you please, but this soon becomes dif­fi­cult to man­age, and intro­duces an extra layer of effort for your guests.

As with so much in plan­ning a wed­ding, the inter­net pro­vides an answer — in the form of a vast selec­tion of dif­fer­ent web sites, such as Mar­riage Gift List, that allow you to com­pose a sin­gle wed­ding list com­bin­ing items from a vari­ety of online stores. Typ­i­cally, these are free ser­vices that oper­ate from small amounts of rev­enue passed back from the com­pa­nies that make the final sale.

But if you’ve already lived with each other, or you’re com­bin­ing two well-stocked house­holds of kitchen­wares and linens, it might feel that you’re sim­ply replac­ing or dupli­cat­ing things you already have. For some cou­ples, a tra­di­tional bridal reg­istry might seem forced, or waste­ful of their guests’ gen­eros­ity and kindness.

And while non-traditional items such as CDs aren’t really appro­pri­ate as a wed­ding gift, it’s true that guests can some­times feel dis­en­gaged from tra­di­tional gifts of home­wares. Tea­spoons or tea-towels? A brandy glass or an oven glove?

Char­ity wed­ding lists

Lit­tle won­der, then, that many cou­ples seek an alter­na­tive. One pop­u­lar choice is to set up a char­ity wed­ding list. This avoids the awk­ward­ness of gifts you don’t need, and has the obvi­ous ben­e­fit of money going to a good cause. Par­tic­u­larly if you’re spend­ing a small for­tune on your wed­ding day, it’s nice to feel that you’ve helped ben­e­fit oth­ers too.

As well as char­ity lists such as those pro­vided by giveit.co.uk or Can­cer Research UK, there are car­bon off­set lists like Car­bon Foot­print, where guest dona­tions are used to plant trees, and ser­vices such as Oxfam Unwrapped where guests can choose from a list of unusual, direct con­tri­bu­tions such as goats, seeds, mos­quito nets and solar pan­els for the third world and elsewhere.

Some­times, though, char­ity wed­ding lists mean that guests can feel their gift isn’t espe­cially per­sonal to you as a cou­ple, and often guests have inde­pen­dent pri­or­i­ties and pref­er­ences for their own char­ity dona­tions. Con­se­quently, many ser­vices now offer char­ity wed­ding favours as a way of mak­ing a dona­tion as part of your wed­ding, with­out ask­ing your guests to con­tribute directly themselves.

Money instead of gift lists — for one big purchase

Guests want to feel that they’re help­ing to set you up for your life ahead together. So while the Blu-Ray of Avatar wouldn’t fit the bill, the HDTV to view it might. Web­sites such as 1bigpresent.co.uk pro­vide for guest con­tri­bu­tions towards a sin­gle, larger item — a gift of some­thing you might not be able to afford with­out help.

Typ­i­cally here, the gift list ser­vice is funded through a com­mis­sion drawn from the gifts you receive. One such ser­vice is youbuymywedding.com, where guests can donate towards the cost of your wed­ding itself.

Money wed­ding gifts — for your honeymoon

An increas­ingly pop­u­lar — and less con­tro­ver­sial — option, is to ask for con­tri­bu­tions towards your hon­ey­moon. Just as many cou­ples have lived with each other before get­ting mar­ried, we’re all also much more used to world­wide travel and amaz­ing hol­i­day expe­ri­ences. Wouldn’t it be great to really push the boat out for your hon­ey­moon, to have the hol­i­day of a lifetime?

Many travel agents, includ­ing Trail­find­ers and Travel Coun­sel­lors, offer a wed­ding list ser­vice where guests can con­tribute finan­cially towards the over­all cost of a couple’s hon­ey­moon. This keeps the process sim­ple, and can avoid addi­tional costs for the wed­ding list ser­vice itself, but guests can some­times feel that their gifts aren’t very per­sonal, and are mea­sured only in terms of the amount they’ve spent.

Money wed­ding gifts — for hon­ey­moon treats!

For this rea­son, inde­pen­dent hon­ey­moon gift list ser­vices such as buy-our-honeymoon.com allow you to itemise dif­fer­ent aspects of your hon­ey­moon — from activ­i­ties, meals and shows, to con­tri­bu­tions towards your first night’s accom­mo­da­tion, or a taxi ride from the air­port. You can add any­thing you like, includ­ing a mix­ture of hon­ey­moon upgrades and tra­di­tional house­hold items for guests that remain more com­fort­able with con­crete goods instead of experiences.

This helps to engage guests and to make your gift list as much an expres­sion of your per­son­al­i­ties as your wed­ding itself, but since guests tend not to buy gifts until close to the wed­ding, you may still need to fund some of your hon­ey­moon costs yourself.

Of course, not every cou­ple chooses to have a wed­ding list at all. Nobody wants to feel that they’re issu­ing tick­ets to their wed­ding, with a gift as the cost of admis­sion — but most guests nonethe­less appre­ci­ate a bit of gen­tle guid­ance. What would be the best present you could have, to start your life together as a mar­ried couple?