Weddingbee Blog

Mr. Biscuit and I registered very early in the planning process. Like, last June early. I know, I know, I was jumping the gun a bit, but I was bored and spending way too much time in front of my computer while I was supposed to be studying for my boards.

After that deed was done, Mr. Biscuit and I started thinking. Did we really need a registry? Mr. B has lived on his own for years and can cook (yay!) so he has pretty much everything he would need for the kitchen. I like to bake and don’t really have the supplies for it; however, Mr. B’s oven is a glorified heating coil that I can’t bake in as I’ve been sufficiently spoiled by my parents’ professional grade oven, and we also don’t really have room for a ton of stuff as Mr. Biscuit’s house is about 1000 sq. feet. Sure, after I graduate we may move into a larger house, but until then, it would be kind of close quarters. And I don’t really like the idea of having close quarters with a pastry cutter. That’s creepy.

To be perfectly honest, we could really use a little help on mortgage payments over a new pot or pan. But, uh, it would probably be considered a wee bit crude to register for cash.

So, we decided the easiest thing to do was to register for nothing.

But I had already made a completely superfluous registry at Tiffany & Co while daydreaming about having Christmas breakfast using my Tiffany Holiday collection pitcher that showed up in registry searches. What were we to do?

Well, we eventually concluded that we would register, but only at stores we wanted things from. We honestly have no need right now for anything from Target or Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and were afraid that if we registered for anything there, we would be inundated with gift cards. And the last time I checked, gift cards were not useful currency when trying to pay a mortgage.

In addition to the frivolous, already finished Tiffany registry, we added a registry to Williams-Sonoma (where I made sure to include MANY low priced baking accessories), Pottery Barn, and Anthropologie (in the form of a wish list). Yes, we made quite a few registries, but our guest list is over 300 and we didn’t register for that many things at any one store, so I felt it was appropriate.

None of these stores are actually in my hometown, but most of our guests are traveling to the wedding—and ordering online or driving up to Pittsburgh is pretty simple. I also thought that maybe people would, you know, take the hint that maybe we were a little cash poor but not appliance poor when they saw that we really didn’t register for that many things.

As soon as people discovered where we had registered, I received a LOT of flak. The conversations usually went a bit like this (though I didn’t say what I actually thought):

But so far, I have kept my tact and stood with my guns. I refuse to register somewhere where I don’t actually need stuff. I also refuse to say, “Um, if you want to give us something, a check would be sweet.” I finally added a little tagline to our Registries page at our website which is hard to read, but basically says we registered for things that we needed plus some upgrades, since we were lucky enough to not need much. Oh, and it delineated me as the baker and Mr. Biscuit as the cook.

It served a dual purpose, to explain why we didn’t register anywhere in town, and to show that I was not the one who registered for the $200 knife (yes, that’s singular). I truly hope that knife is in some way magical. And named Wally.

Emily Post may be rolling over in her grave, but to be perfectly frank, I don’t care. We don’t expect gifts from our guests, but if they clicked the registry page, they were either:

a) wanting to buy us a gift that we wanted and needed

b) wanting to look at our registry and be a Judgey McJudgerson.

So, we were either not offending someone or offending someone who was already looking to be offended. I can live with that.

How did you deal with registry woes?