Wedding Blog
I was thinking about our wedding schedule for the summer, and our new house time line, and I got a little worried. Our house is going to be a little behind schedule. The City of Seattle is over 3 weeks behind on approving building permits. They laid-off part of their workforce late last year, and are now short-handed. Apparently we aren’t the only people trying to take advantage of lower building costs.
My worry isn’t about our living situation. We haven’t given our landlord notice, so we still have a place to live in the event the house isn’t done by mid-August. I’m not worried about the money. I think we have that part sorted out. What I’m worried about are our wedding presents, and the thank you notes.
About 80% of our guests live in Seattle. It’s very likely that the Seattle dwellers will be bringing their wedding gifts to the wedding. This isn’t a problem, except for the fact that I’m worried we won’t get around to opening gifts and sending out thank yous until after we get back from the Honeymoon. No, that’s not a problem either, until I realized we’d be living in boxes, literally. Either we’ll be in our new house, living in boxes, or in our current apartment, living in boxes.
I’d like to say we’ll be incredibly organized and be unpacked in a few days, but I know that’s not realistic. Mr. Joey goes back to teaching a few days after we get back, and I’ve never been away from work for 3 weeks before. I have been out of the office for work trips, and even though I keep up with email, it still takes between 2 or 3 weeks to catch up. In this case, I’ll guess at least a month. I also know it took us 2 months to really get moved in to our current place.
I can see the whole thing now. We don’t get unpacked completely until mid-October/early November. Then Thanksgiving comes around and takes up time, and before we know it, we’re sending Thank You/Christmas/New Year cards.
This sounds greedy, but what I’m hoping for are presents now. We won’t use them (at least I’ll try not to). I just want to get them, make note of who gave what, and spend our 18+ hours (one-way) to and from Australia writing thank yous. This way, we can just drop them into the mailbox when we get home and not feel the pressure to open presents, look for presents (they are bound to get lost in the boxes) and get our thank yous out.
What do you think? Am I being crazy or realistic? Have you found a way to creatively ask for gifts to be shipped rather than brought to the wedding? Keep in mind we don’t have a wedding website.
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Hang in there!
You can’t formally ask guests to send gifts early but you can certainly spread the news via word of mouth. Let folks know that with the move, having things shipped to you before the wedding will make life easier. Tell your parents and bridal party….those groups will be able to reach most of the wedding guests and tell them casually.
As for thank you notes, why not address them and get each started? You can at least put your return address and a stamp on all the envelopes. You can also start the note with a generic line or two. Then when you receive the gift, pop in the last few lines and send it off!
Just start spreading the word with friends and family so they can pass the word along as well. That’s how we are spreading the word about no kids at our wedding.
Well, I don’t know if this will help, but would it be possible to change your registry information so that gifts are shipped to a parent’s house? That is what we did. My mother-in-law got all our gifts delivered to her house, we opened them all their, and then decided what would fit in our apartment and what would have to stay in “storage” (aka her house). That way you could keep them all in one place and just pick things up when you need them/are ready for them.
Have you considered asking your MOH or a close family member to take the gifts to your place after the wedding once you’re off on your honeymoon? maybe they could go through the gifts and send you a quick email while you’re on your honeymoon with the gifter & the gift-given so you can start the thank yous on your way home?
I think you are just going to have to wait. We’re one week from the wedding and we’ve only received a few presents. The good news- etiquette gives you a good chunk of time to get the thank yous out.
And realistically- you are going to be exhausted on the flight- who wants to lug around Thank Yous on your honeymoon. This is just one area that may have to wait!! And yes, why don’t you send the presents to someone else’s house to hold?
I definitely unterstand your concern. Why don’t you ask your parents to take the presents home to their place? If you don’t have time the day after the wedding to open the presents (and make a list of who gave what) at least they’d be easy to find when you get back. WishLaura’s idea about pre-addressing and stamping the thank-yous is great too if you have time now 
We were in a similar state of presents-limbo after our wedding. Although we live in DC, we got married in Georgia. Many guests brought gifts to the wedding, and we were flying away on our honeymoon the next morning…and then flying back from our honeymoon straight to DC. So unless we opened them before we left, we weren’t going to even see them. We didn’t get to pick up our wedding presents in Georgia until two months later at Christmas!
What we did was after the reception we brought the presents back to my parents’ house and opened everything there. We made a list of all the gifts, and I took that with me and used it to write my thank-yous. I didn’t want to have to wait two months to open my presents (and I too wanted to send thank-yous asap). So as long as you’ve seen the presents and written down what was from whom, it doesn’t matter how long they stay in storage or where. Hope that helps!
@WishLaura: I thought about doing that. It might be a good idea.
@laurajane: MOH Joey will be staying at our apartment while we’re gone. I bet she’d love to partially open presents.
@Miss Peep Toe: I figured that would be the case. Hopefully people will understand it our notes are late. I think almost eveyone coming know about the house project.
I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade, but there are a few basic gift etiquette issues that need to be cleared up here:
(1) Guests should never bring presents to the wedding. Seriously. USPS generally does a fine, cheap job (and locals are allowed to hand-deliver, prior to or after the event, if they prefer).
(2) Contrary to what has been hinted at above, thank you notes should go out immediately. (You don’t have a year, more like a week. Think about Christmas gifts–it would be really weird to get a thank you note in July for a winter holiday gift.) So, I feel your pain/cramped writing hand, but maybe you could get a head start on them by addressing envelopes on the plane?
(3) Please, please don’t mention gifts to your guests in any form, unless directly asked. “Creative” = crass. There are two ways to control where presents are sent: (A) put the preferred address on the back of your invitation envelopes as the return address, and (B) update the registry information, if you have one.
Totally not related…but I was just shopping the Anthropologie sale and this top made me think of your wedding
Oh…the link is too long to post 
Just do a search for the Tansy Tee.
@butterfly– I generally agree with what you say, but I disagree on one point. I think wedding present thank-yous are a little different than holiday present thank-yous. Emily Post says 3 months to get out a thank you. I wouldn’t mention anything about shipping presents unless someone asks.
Everyone tells me that most people buy wedding presents a couple days before to the morning of the wedding and won’t have time to ship.
You can buy the envelopes well in advance and pre-address them according to your invitation list. Also, I second (or third or fourth!) the idea of asking your MOH open the presents and put together a list of names and items while you are away.
Aaah, butterfly, the pressure! A week? I know a year is too much, but a week seems crazy. With 200 people at our wedding, plus a honeymoon, there’s no way to get those out in a week (espcially those that arrive at the wedding itself).
Plus, it’s fairly typical for “thank you’s” where I’m from to include a picture of the bride and groom from the wedding day. So when you think about getting the prints from the photographer, choosing a thank you picture, printing up the cards, then writing all those thank yous, I don’t think 3 months is unacceptable.
We set a little message on a couple of our registries requesting that gifts be shipped and providing the address.
Williams-Sonoma allows a message from the bride and groom to show up on the first page of the registry.
The rest we did by word of mouth!
Also, Bed Bath and Beyond all your gifts for a flat fee of $40…which was convenient for us because the wedding is in Chicago, but we’re going to be living in SoCal.
One thing that is one of those etiquette faux pas (but who cares) is have your thank you stationery all picked out now, and make print out address labels on sticker address label sheets for them for all the guests coming to your wedding (rather than handwriting them at some point…). While not every single person will get you a gift (and, some people will give you gifts that dont come to the wedding), you’ll at least have the majority of the addresses for the thank yous all ready to go… and you wont even have to write them. So you can simply peel them off, and voila… envelope addressed. All you need to do is write the note, and hopefully you can find time to write them in small spurts. Its a small thing you can do to ease the tediousness of 100 thank you notes.
I believe if you have a spreadsheet of your guests names and addresses (which I assume you do for your invites) you can do some sort of mail merge and get those addresses onto labels fairly painlessly!
There would be no way I could keep my sanity and get thank-yous out in one week! Miss Joey, I think people will understand your situation, and if you take tips from Mrs. Pengy, you should be alright! Good luck!
This will certainly take all the fun out of it, but my fsil and her husband ran into a very similar situation. So we opened all of the presents they got for them and emailed them as we were opening, so they had a list by the time they were getting on the plane as we stayed up opening the first half for them, and then we finished up and emailed bits over the week they were away also. She ended up having all of the envelopes addressed in advance also and dropped them all in the mail the day they got back!
I’m so impressed by *ktbride2be* ’s comment above! Thats SO incredibly well planned out! I hope when the time comes I’m as forward thinking as you Miss J and ktbride2be’s FSIL!
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Mrs. Joey, Seattle
Age and Occupation: 28, Project Administrator for Public Health NGO
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 30, High School History Teacher
Engagement Date: June 24, 2008
Wedding Date: August 2009
Venue: Eastside Catholic Chapel and Lake Union Cafe
About Me: I'm a Seattle girl through and through except for the fact that I don't drink coffee. I love my job most of the time because I get to travel and work with brilliant people who are trying to prevent Malaria. I love DIY projects of all sorts, cooking, and watching sports. I'd wear anything at Anthropologie and could spend all day on Etsy. I love to travel but shouldn't because I always get myself into unbelievable situations!
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