I'm getting married in a few short months. The wedding planning process has been a huge lesson in patience and teamwork. Over the weekend my fiance and I made a pilgrimage to a giant mall and registered for gifts. The entire concept of registering for gifts was very mentally and emotionally difficult for my fiance and I to come to terms with. We feel that the best gift people can give us is the help is celebrate our marriage by attending out wedding, but we know that people want to give a physical gift as part of the celebration process. And since we don't have a lot of space, we decided it would be better to help people figure out the kind of thing to get us versus leaving them in the dark. So, anyway, we tried incredibly hard to only register for things that we truly want, can use in our lives right now and that we have room to store and take care of in our one bedroom apartment. It was actually more fun than I thought it would be to pick out a silverware pattern and champagne flutes. We also got a lot of congratulations from perfect strangers who saw us walking around with the little barcode reader and knew exactly what modern rite of passage we were undergoing.
After the very simple process of selecting items we wanted from
Crate and Barrel, as a thank you gift for registering there, they gave us a rather large, rather heavy glass dish in the shape of a heart. Ack! We didn't open it up until we left the store, but I really wish we had said thanks but no thanks. It's another example of how free stuff is usually just clutter. A glass heart shaped dish isn't something we love or something we need, and we don't have anyplace to put it. So it's leaving our home as soon as possible. The wedding clutter must be curbed!
Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com
Congratulations. I have a post about my wedding planning last Spring that you might find helpful. I used Evernote to plan the entire event... without a wedding planner or the costs associated with one. you can find the info here: http://www.organize-more-stress-less.com/home/2009/8/12/my-wedding-organizing-secret.html
ReplyDeleteI really like Evernote. Thanks for the link!
ReplyDeleteMy sister registered at http://www.honeyfund.com/. In essence, the site allows you to register for hotels, dinners, and activities you plan to do during your honeymoon. She found she still needed to register for some physical gifts, but she spread the word that she would prefer to have memorable experiences instead of anything else for her Manhattan apartment.
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