Traditionally when folks got married, the gifts people gave them were all the things they needed to start a new life together. Kate and I are still getting rid of all the doubles of those things we had from when we were living on our own! So a lot of the traditional wedding gifts that go on a registry are things we just don’t need.
Additionally, we know that a lot of folks had to travel in order to come to the wedding and that cost a lot of money. We thought about ways we could reduce this, but no matter where we put the wedding, a lot of people were going to have to travel. All that to say, we’re both firm believers in the “if you have to travel for a wedding, showing up is the gift.”
Because of all this, we don’t have a registry but we also know that some folks will still want to give us a gift and not having a registry can make it hard for people to pick what to give. Here’s some of our thoughts/guidance in that area:
If you have a tradition that your family loves and you'd like to pass on to our new family, that’s a great gift!
If you have some items that make your life much easier and you wanna give those to us, that’s great! We love things that save us time!
If you want to give money, we appreciate it! You don’t have to give any, but we do know that some people like to do that at weddings so we should address it. Some wedding sites, like the one we use, charge fees to set up those “pay towards our honeymoon” type things and it seems silly to just give away 3% of the money to some random company. If you’re the type of person that wants to give money then we recommend a check or venmo (@Patrick-Marusksa or @SandlerK) are both good because we don’t have to give any of the money to a random company. And to be extra clear, if you don’t wanna give money you don’t have to!
One thing that’s probably not a great gift for us is experiences. We’re using up all our vacation for the year on the wedding and a honeymoon and we won’t have any additional vacation time, so things that require us to take time off aren’t things we will be able to use for a while.