Green wedding registries?
This is a year of weddings. Even though the length of engagement has ranged from 5 years to less than one, many of my friends are getting married this year. I like to think of myself as a trendsetter, but it’s getting a bit ridiculous. Maggie and I are preparing to head down to NC next week for my brother’s wedding. I have another wedding in NC in July and two in September as well as a CA wedding to attend in July. Maggie has local friends getting married in early October and we’re getting married in the middle of October.
I feel bad about it, but there are so many in so many different places (and I’ve got so much else going on) that I just won’t be able to attend them all. I do want to at least get a small gift for each couple, but I find that very difficult in most cases.
Recently, Get Rich Slowly posted a guest column about how terrible registries are. I disagree with a lot of the reasons (uh… you don’t have to ship presents directly from the registry) and the follow-up is even worse. There are some valid points there, though.
Registries seem to be in flux right now as they change to fit current culture. It used to be that a wedding was a good way for a couple to get all of the things necessary for starting a life together. With weddings happening later and later, most couples already have the necessities. In many cases, that makes registries lists of “wants” rather than “needs” or leads to expensive registries.
Maggie and I have talked a little bit about how we want to set up a registry. We have everything we need that isn’t super expensive, so there doesn’t seem to be much point in a registry. It’ll either be full of random junk (as cool as it is, do I really need an air switch lamp?) or expensive items that we need (a kitchen table). It feels really wrong to force ourselves to come up with a list commercial things that we want.
On the other hand, I know that I often find registries helpful to at least give me a starting point. For example, when some of my friends got married a couple of years back and asked for an air popcorn popper, I got that for them as well as a movie we’d enjoyed together in college and some popcorn to go along with it. For another couple, I got a bunch of random kitchen items and packaged them up with some of my favorite recipes. If we follow that model, maybe creating a registry would be a good way for us to indicate to our friends what sort of values we’re trying to cultivate. But are there really places to register that reflect our (non-consumer) values? Target seems exactly wrong.
We probably will register with a charity like Heifer International, but that doesn’t help people who want to bring or send something physical.
Our wedding is still a while off, but we want to have most of the registry stuff done before we send out invitations (so that we can list registry information on our currently nonexistent wedding site) and that deadline gets closer and closer every day. What do you guys think? What’s a good way for us to help people choose something in line with our values without being preachy (if someone does get us something from Target, we’ll still appreciate it)?
Oh, and Rob? I don’t even know if you have a registry because I figured out the perfect gift over Christmas. I’m looking forward to giving it to you next week!
Angel said,
May 14, 2008 @ 7:57 pm
While we did set up a registry, whenever asked about it we try to let people know that it’s not a list of definite items that we *must* have with no substitutions. Rather, we tried to treat our registry as a suggestion to give a feel of things we find interesting, or that might be helpful as we “start” (ehm. . . continue) our life together. We’re in a very similar position to you and Maggie, in which we have most of the necessities already, and we don’t really want alot of big things because we’ll just have to pack them up again in a very short time when we move. We had a very difficult time thinking of anything to ask for because we just didn’t see many “needs” that were gaping holes in our home or lives. In fact, we practically had to be pushed to make the registry. Personally, I tend not to have any clue what to tell people to give me as a gift for any occasion because I’m already content. I don’t feel like I need anything else. . .
We did put links to some charities on the website as an alternative to commercialized gifts and then just tried to relax about it. We also tried to register for things in the budget range of most of our guests (the poor college crowd). We actually had a relative worried because they didn’t know what to get us and everything on our registry was “so cheap.”
I don’t know if that’s helpful at all, but it’s my two cents.
Linnea said,
May 15, 2008 @ 12:49 am
You could always just make a quick list and have it on your site.
Jessica said,
May 15, 2008 @ 3:13 pm
There are lots of different green websites on which you can register for a wedding or baby shower or whatever you might feel you want to register for. I keep a registry on Gaiam, Motherwear, and a few other green sites, not to mention Amazon, not because I’m expecting gifts, but just because it makes me feel like I’m shopping when I set up the registries. I know, I know, its crazy! Actually, they’re more like wish lists, but its still crazy.
Also, you can set up a registry on a registry site, like http://www.findgift.com, and you can put desired items from any site on there, whether the site has a registry or not. I did this for my baby shower, and got not one thing off of that registry, but it was worth a shot.
You could also see about a money registry. Here in Colorado we have a big furniture chain called American Furniture Warehouse. They do a wedding registry where people can just go and give the couple 20 bucks (or whatever amount they choose) and then the couple can use all the money that is given to buy furniture. Maybe there is something like that around you?
You can of course ask for money or gift certificates, but it seems like a lot of people will either give you nothing or decide for themselves what they want to buy you if you do that. My parents asked for money when they got married, and what they got were dozens of sets of towels and 50 bucks. No one ever will need as many towels as they got.
Most of the time people don’t shop off the registry anyhow. I don’t know why. Its like they’re going to buy you whatever the hell they want and they don’t care what you want or need. Its almost pointless to set one up.
A good friend of mine, instead of asking for presents, asked the guests of her wedding to each bring food. Then they had a big buffet reception. I think thats a great idea and might decide to do that when and if I ever get married. That keeps the over all wedding cost down, makes for a really unique meal, and ensures that something is there that everyone will like.
Theres a few ideas for you.
Will said,
May 15, 2008 @ 5:29 pm
Those are all good ideas. Maybe we’ll explore those as we set things up.
Jessica: We thought about doing a potluck for our wedding, but so many of our friends and family are coming from out of town that it seemed prohibitive. Either they’d have to bring something on the flight/drive or they’d have to cook in the hotel or I don’t know what else.
However, I am thinking about encouraging some grilling for lunch if the weather is nice.
arduous said,
May 16, 2008 @ 2:25 am
I agree about setting up a website with a list of things you would like. One of my friends basically told all her friends that she didn’t really need “stuff,” and would love to receive wine as a gift. She got enrolled in a wine of the month club and a cheese of the month club, and those were her favorite wedding presents!
You can ask for fair-trade coffee, or chocolate or movie gift passes or Netflix. Or maybe museum subscriptions or play subscriptions. Or gift certs to your favorite restaurants in town. Phrase it as, Maggie and I really have all the “things” we need. We’d love for you to donate to Heifer International in our honor. However if you would rather get us some sort of gift, we’d love gifts that allow us to spend more quality time with each other.
melissa said,
May 16, 2008 @ 6:23 pm
to follow up on what arduous said, there is a website http://www.alternativegiftregistry.org/ that actually allows you to register for different things like subscriptions, charitable donations, etc., plus any “stuff” that you may want/need. It’s pretty cool.
BPT - MoneyChangesThings said,
May 17, 2008 @ 5:43 pm
Hi Guys,
Nice blog. I’m the author of the Get Rich Slowly blogpost on wedding registries. learned a lot about how others use them.
I live in a city residential neighborhood far from any big box stores where people typically register. I have only bought off a wedding registry once or twice (and the ickiness of those experiences prompted my post.) I try to drive as little as possible. Why on earth would I want to waste time and gas driving to a store to buy something for people out of town whose wedding i wasn’t personally attending? I am still fairly in the dark as to why anyone would go to a store to buy something off the store’s registry. Seems incredibly inefficient of both time and gas. Just mentioning this since you say here that the way to counteract in impersonal quality of buying from a registry is to go to the store to personally get the present and deliver it. Maybe if you live in a small town that makes sense, but in most cases, I don’t see how that would be remotely ecological.
Anyway, good luck thinking this all through. It’s a definite value challenge.
Dana said,
May 20, 2008 @ 4:20 pm
In one of the wedding things I’ve perused lately, I saw a mention of sites that are trying to help counteract the move toward later-in-life wedding registries with expensive needed stuff, where it allows people to donate toward particular expensive items, and once enough has been donated, the item is shipped. (Presumably it keeps track of how much was given to almost buy stuff as well, so you can top it off yourself or whatever.) I haven’t looked into these things yet, since we’re not doing registries until after we’re moved into the house, darn it!, but it was an interesting idea.
Also, now is the time to put in your request for the gift you want from my Japan/China trip next month. I now completely understand the Asian obsession with buying gifts to have on hand “just in case.” I gave my most recent wedding friends stuff I bought when I was in China nearly 4 years ago!
Will said,
May 20, 2008 @ 10:17 pm
That looks really useful, melissa!
BPT: Thanks for the comment! It really drives home to me that the right answer for one person may be totally different than for someone else. Since I’ve personally attented all of the weddings I’ve gotten gifts for (a trend that I’ll break next month), it’s been easy for me to get a gift and give it in person. I also didn’t always get the gift from the place where they’d registered even though I used the register as a starting place, so I never had to go out of my way to get something.
Of course, we have lots of big box shopping close by, so it’s easy for me in any case. We live in a pretty large town and I used to live in a larger city, so I know it can be done in lots of places. I don’t want my registry to seem an imposition to people in other circumstances though.
Dana: Yeah, I’ve heard about places like that. I’m not sure how comfortable I am asking people to give us money even if it’s going towards something specific. But as Money Changes Things mentions in her follow-up, there seem to be some regional variations on what’s appropriate.
Maggie and I can’t think of anything specific, but we don’t really know what China and Japan have to offer. If you see something you think we’ll like, we promise to be duly impressed that it came all the way from Asia.