Wedding Blog

Mr. Tulip and I have not yet faced the dreaded wedding registry. It seems crazy to dread what’s basically a big shopping spree, but when people in their 30s consolidate two households into a single small condo, there just isn’t much that you need! My whole life these days seems centered around getting rid of excess items in preparation for the move…. And even where we do need stuff, we both have unique style preferences that make it more likely we’d find the perfect item in a random Web boutique than in the big stores that host most wedding registries. To date, none of the registries I’ve seen has seemed to address that problem. I thought of Wists, which allow you to make a wish list of any item on the Web, but the downside is that they offer no way to show whether something has been purchased.

But, suddenly, there’s a great new solution thanks to The Center for a New American Dream. (Which I’m fond of because they’re based about a mile from my house — yay for locals!) The Center aims to support “conscious consumerism,” which encompasses everything from making eco-friendly purchases to reducing the sheer volume of stuff that we purchase.

The Center’s newest venture is an Alternative Gift Registry. The goal of this new registry is to take some of the focus off material goods and instead stress “the shared joy of the event.” As a result, the registry allows you to sign up for absolutely anything, including “immaterial” gifts. For example, their sample wedding registry includes requests for favorite recipes, for someone to share housekeeping expertise, and for people to bake pies for the wedding reception. But it’s not limited to immaterial items — in fact, you can link to goods from any site on the Web (or even give directions to real-world stores…). Unlike my Wist idea, however, this registry has the added benefit that gift givers can mark a gift “purchased” as a signal to other guests. So far, it strikes me as an ideal registry…. Mr. T and I will be signing up for sure, and will let you know how it goes!

What registries are you using? Are there other sites out there that solve the “don’t need more stuff” problem??