Pretend shopping is so much fun

Look away if you're of the "registries are unseemly" school of thought, like Miss Manners. Dan leans more that way than I do ("it's presumptuous to register for wedding gifts"), but I am:

1. Practical
2. Picky
3. Pretty fond of making prioritized lists

I guess my position on registries is a bit like my position on signing a prenup agreement. I'm not registering us for stuff because I am expecting gifts (Miss Manners had quite a few sizzlers against people who treat weddings as a "time to pay up!"), just like I don't think prenups are about expecting to get divorced. It's just more like, well, if it happens, good to have a plan. 

Incidentally, Dan and I had talked about going through the process of signing a prenup, but we decided against it because we're pretty open with each other about our finances already and the brief research we did into them suggested they are rather expensive given our lack of large assets--even the online DIY kind, since you have to get a lawyer involved at some point to make them legally binding. There is such a thing as postnup agreements, though, so if somehow one of us wins the lottery or comes into a huge inheritance from a stranger, we can always figure it out later.

Anyway, since we're the first among our peers to get hitched, we haven't gone to any weddings as adults responsible for considering and selecting a gift. I've heard enough complaints and horror stories secondhand about the costs associated with just being a guest to a wedding, though, so it's a big goal for us to minimize that as much as possible. 

You should know that if you've been invited, it's because we would like you to be there. We're grateful for your having even just made the effort to get there, and I promise I won't care about what, if any, gift you bring, as long as you do the same for choices we've made that you may disagree with (i.e. no sit-down dinner, or whatever else). That was kind of the whole point of planning an affordable wedding, not a blowout fundraiser. 

Plus, we've been living together for over a year now (!) and clearly anything we really need, we've already procured (though shoutouts are in order to my parents' basement and Dan's relatives for providing so much seed furniture and Bed Bath & Beyond goods to get us going).

If I were designing the whole system, I'd have an algorithm that takes into account considerably more than just a per person estimate (single, single+guest, family, etc.), which is my current understanding of how people usually figure out what to give. It'd be a sliding scale that would consider your travel costs, your current status in life (grad student vs. top executive at a company...though I don't think anyone we're inviting is a top executive, actually), how long you've known us, how close we are, and the thought you've put in. But as Dan often has to remind me, I can't make the world be more practical and logical in the way that I want it to be.

Well, hopefully that preamble's long enough to convince people that I really am being sincere (really, I am, I just think I have to talk a lot to convince people of that, especially when it comes to something that can be as fraught with unspoken resentment like gifts). Now, onto the actual registries themselves.

I decided to register us on Amazon and at Bed Bath & Beyond (hereafter referred to as BBB), instead of something like Wishpot. I didn't really look into other online registry systems very much and I just figured Amazon is convenient for everyone, especially with its universal registry feature. The universal registry allows you to add items from other websites to your Amazon list and it does this nice thing of pulling a photo from the page as well. People can then look at your Amazon list and mark off certain items as "reserved", meaning they'll purchase it from the other store or any place they can get a better price for it. This saves you from the trouble of creating registry accounts at a ton of other stores (I've been working on an audit of all my various online accounts, and good god I have so many! ugh).

Mama G had recommended also registering at a store that would be easy for people to get to in-person if they didn't want to buy stuff online, and Dan agreed (still with the "registries are presumptuous stance"). I'd considered Nordstrom because that's my favorite department store, but their home goods section online isn't very extensive and you can't manage a wedding registry there online either. Then I considered Macy's but I gave up quickly because I find their site too busy and annoying to look at.

After that, Dan suggested good ole BBB. Most of the kitchen things I'd added to the Amazon list (from my existing extensive and ranked personal Amazon wishlist for cooking stuff, ahem) were also available at BBB. BBB tends to be slightly more expensive, but people can use the 20% coupons (I try never to buy anything at BBB without a coupon of some kind, even if it's like $5) and that's the tradeoff for the convenience for people who don't want to buy stuff online, I guess. Also, I liked that while they asked me whether I wanted to be contacted by a "registry consultant," I could choose to just ignore that and do everything online. I'm not quite sure about the flatware and tableware I picked out--BBB's site has some reviews but not very many--but it should be fine since BBB has a forgiving return policy.

Still, Amazon's list has better features even outside of the universal registry thing, which I guess isn't too surprising. Amazon will let you group by category or by price range ($0-25, $25-$50, etc...they recommend getting in stuff mostly in the $50-$100 range, but evidently I'm a $0-$50 or ~$200 kind of shopper :P). You can also leave comments, so I've put in some comments for certain items on where else they might be purchased for cheaper

Best of all, you can set priorities of "Love to have," "Like to have," and "Nice to have." I've left most of them as just "Nice to have" (small kitchen gadgets, stuff from the Moma and CB2 stores) but the "Love to have" items for me are like a food processor, a West Elm carpet, a Roomba, and anything from Heath Ceramics. Once my mom gets back to me on her preferred brand of vacuum, that's definitely going on as a "Love to have" too because our current vacuum is terrible.

True story: Amazon was playing around with redesigning their personal wishlist design and took away the prioritization feature for a bit, and I sent them not just one, but two panicked emails asking for it to be reinstated because it messed with my rankings, and I got a response from them assuring me that they'd put it back, and thanks for my feedback. Like whoa.

Most of the other kitchen stuff I would really love to have (I know I'm not the only one who didn't grow up not dreaming much about my wedding day except for getting a brightly colored KitchenAid stand mixer) is on the BBB list, but ultimately everything is really just a nice to have anyway, like wine glasses. I'm still close enough to college only to be slightly ashamed by drinking (and serving) wine in mugs, but I haven't been able to justify buying any real glasses since Dan's allergic to sulfites and therefore I usually only buy wine when people come over, which isn't that often either. I picked out a couple of the stemless ones from the Riedel O series, the reviews seem to be pretty good.

I am pleased with myself for thinking of a vermicomposter to add to the Amazon list, though, as it's definitely in the category of "probably too expensive and unnecessary for me to purchase one myself, but would love to try it." Dan is not as pleased.

Putting together the registries was more fun than I had expected. I mean, shopping for yourself usually is pretty fun, this just exceeded my expectations still. I had been saving it for after I got some more actually necessary wedding planning done, but since the save-the-dates have been ordered and I've made a rough project timeline for the remaining 150+ days until the wedding, I let myself indulge and got quite into it last night.

For background: I have spent quite a few evenings adding to and arranging and rearranging to put on my various personal wishlists, just for the pleasure of organizing and researching reviews and having A Plan for what things I want to spend money on. I find it therapeutic even when I stop short of actually spending any money, so imagine the fun for a wedding registry when the likelihood of getting stuff is non-zero! I highly recommend it.

Well, this is probably enough indulging in materialism. If you need help figuring out what to put on your own registry, this is what I used:

• stuff that I had on my personal lists from Alton Brown's recommendations
• this build your own smitten kitchen guide (can't wait for her book to come out!)
• Cook's Illustrated equipment reviews: I have been an online member for about 3 years now, mostly to get to their equipment reviews.
• I looked at this Apartment Therapy post on Best Everyday China 2010, but didn't actually add anything from there
• Souris Marriage's registry MVP list. Souris Marriage also had a couple guest posts from LPC of Privilege, whose blog I've just added to my Google Reader because I enjoyed these posts and her About page so much:

The native fun of registering for wedding presents can swiftly devolve into confusion, or even distress. This is largely because people are apt to Have Opinions. Which they will want to tell you...I can help with opinions like, "You MUST have formal china," or, "But dear, that is not the Done Thing," or, "Everyone always registers for crystal." Because High WASPs (my culture of origin) invented the Done Thing, and, although disappearing from earth in alarming numbers, we stand on our authority in the world of china, glass, and silver.
...
That said, I recommend you furnish the life you will lead. Rather than collect goods. Life is short. We have to eat, and over the years you will be putting a lot of food into your mouth. With any luck people you love will be eating with you. Maybe around a table, maybe at a kitchen counter. Buy plates for those moments. Imagine where those plates will be kept, where they will be used, how on earth they will get cleaned. Same goes for glasses, forks and knives, table mats.* Household good have lives. The lives you give them.

You are not registering for objects. You are registering for use. Not stuff, but the backdrop to memories you will look back on down the decades. I know. Time. Your family. The values you will work so hard to establish and pass down to children, if you have them. It happens while we eat.

On Mismatched Expectations

I am a firm believer in the importance of expectations. Take a simple example. Let's say you're a parent, and you are driving your child to get blood drawn for the first time. The child senses that something is going to happen but is not sure what. He asks, "Mommy/Daddy, what's 'getting blood drawn?'"

I see three courses of action here:

1. Downplay it: "Oh, it's nothing! It'll feel like a little pinch."
2. Exaggerate it: "It's going to feel like you left your arm on a hot stove for several minutes."
3. Level with the child: "It will sting a little and will feel a little strange for about a minute, but you'll be OK."

Now, I would bet that it's about an even split between parents who choose Option A and Option C, with a small minority of sadists and humourists selecting Option B. As someone who believes firmly in establishing expectations, I would skew towards C.

Why? Well, it's mainly a process of elimination choice. If I go with A, and my child is particularly sensitive to pain (something that is hard to gauge when dealing with someone else's nerve endings), the child will be (rightfully) annoyed with me for misleading them. If I go with B, the child will likely panic for the remainder of the drive; their relief when the blood is actually drawn (if the blood ever gets drawn) will be nice, but likely small satisfaction. A prolonged reliance on B-like strategies will also presumably cause psychological traumatization (from here).

B, on the other hand, offers fair expectations to the child. They will be nervous, and I may be forced to offer additional reassurance, but they now know what to expect.

People act on expectations all the time. If they expect that new flat screen TV to drop in price for the holidays, they may postpone their purchase for another month. If they expect to get a raise, they may start spending a bit more money in advance. If they expect to have to skip lunch, they may eat a larger breakfast, or may pack a Nutri-Grain bar for the road.

Like most things, weddings are about expectations. Everyone who heard that Katherine and I got engaged had some expectations about what the wedding will actually look like. Likewise, everyone who gets an invitation will, for at least a moment or two, create a picture--or, rather, a mental model--of how the wedding will look.

(This is another one of those principles for me. Back when I was in an educational psychology class, we talked a bit about mental models in learning. One of the jobs of a teacher is to help students draw accurate, understandable mental models of reality; the mental model of the solar system for a third grader will inevitably be less sophisticated than the mental model for an astronomer, but both models need to depict the abstract concept in a concrete way in order to be effective. I see the wedding the same way.)

Mismatched expectations lead to conflict, fights, divorce, miscommunication, wars, and all manners of other problems. Take weddings. If John likes to drink, and assumes that weddings will have alcohol, but sees no alcohol when he arrives, John will be angry. If, however, John has been informed in advance of the dryness of the wedding, John will adjust his expectations accordingly (or wisely send a small gift and skip the affair altogether).

I anticipate that the most controversial aspect of the wedding will be the choice of food. We have made two potentially-unpopular decisions:

1. We will not be serving a full meal; the menu calls for a variety of hors d'oeuvres and other light fare.
2. We will not be serving a traditional wedding cake, having decided that pies are better, and more interesting, than cake.

Thus, going forward, we have two places for potential disappointment or, worse, outward anger (particularly when combined with freely-available social lubricant). My goal here is to determine how best to enhance the mental models of our guests, and head off any potential problems before the wedding day.

I see a few different ways to do this:

1. Strategic leaking: We can leak to select potential (chatty) wedding guests that the menu will be mostly hors d'oeuvres, and that we are serving pies, rather than cake.
2. Publicly-available website: We can direct people on the invitations to this blog or our wedding website, which will have the full menu available to readers, well-wishers, and guests.
3. Invitation enclosures: We can include a copy of the menu in the wedding invitation.
4. Caveat emptor: We can do nothing, and conduct a small social experiment.

Option A gives me the enjoyment of categorizing our guests according to their interconnectedness (and loquaciousness), which might be perversely fun. Sadly, I think it is ultimately too difficult to verify that the information has been passed.

Going with only Option B requires a good bit of additional work from the guests. Most people will not visit a website that they receive on a piece of snail mail. People are busy, and have far more important things to worry about than our wedding. (As my mother would say, it's probably not in "their top two.") By the time they start thinking about the wedding, it is quite possible that the invitation was lost, or that the information was written elsewhere.

I personally am leaning towards Option C, likely in combination with B. It is the most direct and transparent way to circulate the information that I want to circulate. It also, I think, gives people a chance to look inside the process a bit, and to feel involved.

In another context, Option D could be fun. But I would like to get the marriage off on the right foot. There are thousands of potential flashpoints in this sort of social interaction; as the logistics guy here, my goal is to minimize them.

So, as of now, I am in favor of including the full menu along with our invitations, preferably on some sort of ceremonial stationery, along with posting it on the website. Katherine agrees, but we're still trying to figure out a way to word it and make it look classy. Any ideas?

Miss Manners' Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding

I'm running out of chances to renew this book again, so I wanted to try to get in the notes I wanted to take down about Miss Manners' Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding. As Robin commented the last time I mentioned Miss Manners' book, as you're reading it, you do feel a little bit under attack as the bride. Fortunately, Miss Manners at least ends the book with a letter from a beleaguered bride listing the many occasions in which rudeness from guests comes up and then acknowledges that she's been a bit "snappish" after being overexposed to brides with the "After All It's MY Day" credo.

In general my attitude to these kinds of guides to etiquette is that it's at least good to know what other people might be expecting. I bought a copy of Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior after I behaved entirely gauchely towards a college roommate who was going through a rough time with the deaths of several relatives. Western culture etiquette has been something that I feel like I've needed to try to teach myself. [edit, in response to Lisa's comment] Regardless, I think generally if you honestly try to be considerate and thoughtful of others, that's the whole point of etiquette anyway, so it doesn't matter if you didn't follow an advice columnist's directives exactly.

The helpful thing to remember is that Miss Manners isn't trying to sell you anything here, unlike etiquette givers in wedding magazines might be. My favorite line in the whole book is, "the theme of a wedding is marriage." Also, I've always rather enjoyed Miss Manners' arch tone, but I can see how that's not for everyone. In conclusion, worth checking out from the library but probably not worth buying.

Miss Manners says:

• [edit, forgot to include this part initially because I didn't have a post-it note marking it] Determining your guest list: when starting to plan a wedding, first sit down and figure out who your A+ list is (that clearly isn't Miss Manners' terminology, I just made that up), meaning who has to has to be there, for the couple in consultation with both sets of parents. I'll admit, we didn't really do the parental consultation part too much before deciding on our estimate of 100 guests and looking for venues to fit that number of people. Miss Manners shakes her finger at not including your parents just because you're paying for everything on your own, which, yeah, fair point. I hope Dan and I managed to strike a sufficient compromise, though.
• Maid of honor (p124): you don't have to have a maid of honor, you can just have all bridesmaids. I have to say, I'm not entirely clear on what really distinguishes a maid of honor from bridesmaids, unless the position is basically saying, here is my very best friend of all the girls I've asked to be my bridesmaids. I think someone's told me at some point that the maid of honor serves as one of the witnesses when you do the legal bit, but I'm not sure if that has to be the case.
• On dealing with people trying to invite themselves (p147): "Here is a phrase that every prospective bride and bridegroom and everyone in both families should memorize: 'Oh, dear, it's just going to be a small family wedding, with maybe a few old, intimate friends. You are so nice to take an interest.' ...Let us say that the word [small] is used out of modesty, rather than crowd estimation."
• On the plus one issue (p152): for established couples, both members should be invited. The hosts can ask their unattached guests individually if there is anyone they would to bring, get the name, and issue another invitation in this person's name, so guests don't feel pressured to bring a date (I really want to make sure people don't feel pressured to bring a date simply for the sake of having a date). Miss Manners frowns upon just issuing an invitation "plus one," though this is what we're going to do for everyone over 18 (one of the points that Dan feels more strongly about). If you've been invited to a wedding as the guest of a guest, you should check to make sure you've really been invited with a note to the bride that's something like "____ has asked me to accompany him to your wedding. I would consider it a great honor to attend, but I would also understand if his enthusiasm has overrun any boundaries. In any case, I send you my very best wishes for your happiness."
• Timing of invitations (p192): send out 4-6 weeks prior to the wedding date
• On invitation design (p179): engraving is meant to imitate handwriting for making it more convenient to send out a greater number of formal invitations, so hand-printed invitations (calligraphy) are perfectly acceptable to getting professionally engraved invitations.
• Invitation wording (p213): "a couple giving its own wedding modestly goes into the passive tense when issuing formal invitations," something like "The pleasure of your company is requested at the marriage of ____ to ____ on Saturday, the eighteenth of June at one thirty, Mountain Lakes House, Princeton and afterwards at a reception."
• On reply cards in invitations (p185): unnecessary to include stamped response cards.
• Thank you cards (p246): for gifts of money, write your thank you message referencing what you bought or plan to buy with that money, so that the "rest of your thanks can apply to that present, as if the giver had selected it."
• Thank you card response time (p244): should be written and sent out as soon as the gift is received in order to acknowledge it. It's actually wedding presents that can be sent up to year into the marriage.
• Miss Manners is against both registries and favors (p270 "Etiquette has never thought of weddings as comparable to children's birthday parties, where the guests might need consolation for not being the center of attention.")
• No programs (p90): "the only excuse for a program is to give the order of the service, which is not necessary at a wedding." (Miss Manners is pretty strongly against all things that make the wedding a bit of a show, which I am down with)
• Receiving line (p120, 261): charming and necessary for making sure you talk to all the guests at some point during the wedding. Guests are received at the beginning of the reception. The traditional order tries to mix the families of the bride and groom with bride's mother, groom's father, groom's mother, bride's father.
• First dance (p272): the bridal couple opens the dancing, not gives "a private dance featuring their relatives." Halfway through the bridal couple's dance, the bride's father cuts in to dance with his daughter, the groom brings in his mother (can also be done with respective in-laws first), and then followed by the bridesmaids and groomsmen to encourage the rest o the guests to follow.
• Toasts (p270): "At the wedding reception, the best man offers the first toast, and others may follow, including the bridegroom, to offer toasts to his bride and to her parents."
• Tipping the bartender (p268): you don't tip the bartender at a private function
• Reception timing (p261): the married couple should leave the reception before the guests.
• Announcing your decision on changing or keeping your last name with an at home card (p216): either "Mr. and Mrs. James Scott will be at home after the Fourth of July" or "Ms. Heather McGee / Mr. Daniel Scott" with the adress in the bottom right o the card (my question is though, how do you actually send these at home cards out? Tucked into thank you cards?)

More on thank you notes from Souris Marriage:

However, you have to toe the line between deep appreciation and unmasked materialism. It's fine to be excited about your new Dutch Oven, for instance, but you should always be MORE excited that whoever gave it to you came to the wedding. Specifics are very important in both cases. Extra points for referencing some future event or experience unrelated to the thing you're thanking them for--this emphasizes lasting friendships rather than stuff.