Weddingbee Blog

Cinnamon Buns and I went to register the other day. We realise that the wedding isn’t until June, but we get so few days off together that we had to jump on it. We went to The Bay (founded in 1670!), as Bays are all over Canada and seem to be the standard in wedding registries here. We chose The Bay because we wanted it to be convenient for all our Canadian friends, and while Calgary just got a Crate & Barrel, there aren’t many around the country, and we have friends who are (hopefully!) coming from all over.

We went in, filled out some paperwork, and were given the scanny gun. Cinnamon Buns had altogether too much fun pointing it at me and saying, “Pew pew! Lasers!” 

Then we got into the nitty-gritty of registering. That conflicted feeling of “Ooooh, blender…Mmmm, KitchenAid pasta attachment” versus “This is so greedy! Why are we doing this? Our friends are artists!”

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We’ve also been living together for four years, and when Mr. CB and I moved in together, my grandpa had just downsized from a three-bedroom house to living with my parents. Cinnamum saved a lot from Grandpa’s house for Cinnamon Buns and me to go through, so we were pretty much set from the moment we moved in. Earlier this year (before getting engaged), I bought myself (possibly with a mutter of, “If we were getting married, this would be on a registry“) that holy grail of the kitchen, the KitchenAid mixer. We have a Crock Pot. (LOVE. IT.) We have a toaster. Rice cooker, check. Blender…OK, we have one, but it makes funny noises. The only thing we don’t really have is china. I mean, we have plates, bowls, mugs, and pasta bowls, but we have four of this size and pattern of plate, six of this smaller size and different pattern of plate, four of these bowls, two of those bowls, and one of that type…I’m not going to lie—it’ll make me happy to open our cupboard and see matching things in there.

As we were going around the store, I was getting into the whole registering thing. Beep beep beep. Mr Cinnamon Buns looked intrigued by a coffee mug with a French press inside it, so I said, “Let’s scan it! Beep!” But he said no; if he wanted it he’d get it himself. He said no to scanning the Corningware dishes that could replace scary plastic Tupperware. I kept thinking, “Why are we here if we’re barely going to scan anything?” Eventually, I stopped and said, “I don’t want to sound greedy, but people are going to want to buy us gifts. It’s a wedding thing. It will happen. Better that they buy things we actually want!”

Mr. Cinnamon Buns came back with a very good answer—that he’d rather we fill the registry up with just the china and flatware stuff we want so we have a good chance at getting a full set instead of a few dishes and a bunch of things like coffee mugs and wine stoppers. I’m marrying a smarty-pants! I realised that he was right. No point putting the travel mugs on there—we can get those ourselves if we want to. We have bedding we like, we have good towels, we have appliances that work. What we, as a couple, need (No one really needs the stuff that’s on registries, right? You can eat without matching plates and bowls.) want is a set of china. And cutlery that wasn’t $5.99 at Canadian Tire.

So I scaled back my thinking, and Cinnamon Buns opened his up enough to include a couple things that were non-china (blender, spare KitchenAid bowl), and I think we got along quite well. Apart from when I had to take the scanny gun away from him because of the “pew pew!” noises.

For all my complaining about our mismatched china, we went with a line that we could mix and match. But this stuff actually coordinates, unlike the stuff currently in our cupboards. The hard part was choosing which patterns to get in which pieces! We went with Denby’s Jet line, with accents of Jet Stripes and Jet Skyline.

Plain Jet pasta bowls and big plates (We went with the black.)

Jet Stripes cereal bowls and tea plate

Jet glass tumbler, Jet Skyline mug

Jet Skyline serving bowl, Jet Stripes serving platter

(All the above photos are from Denby’s website.)

We ended up with a fairly good range of prices, from”group gift” prices (the blender, the serving pieces) to individual gift prices. We know that Denby is pricey (but the Bay does have sales!), so we understand that one person might just get us a plate or one place setting of cutlery. That’s fine; we’ve done that at other friends’ weddings when they registered for Denby! Cinnamum-in-Law has encouraged the Irish side of the family to send money rather than gifts, apparently, so we can always buy the rest of the set with that.

Did you have a hard time finding the balance of “I want stuff” with “This is so greedy!” when registering? Did you go with fewer items that you really wanted, or lots of stuff you kinda wanted?