Weddingbee Blog

You guys were wondering what to get us for the wedding, weren’t you? I mean…the guests were wondering. What do you get for a couple who already lives together in a small one-bedroom apartment, who might be moving and selling off all of their possessions in a couple years, and who are traveling 7,000 kilometers to the wedding and might not have the most room in their suitcases for gifts?

Image via Wikipedia

OK, it’s kind of tacky to straight up ask for money. But I do not want any of these:

Image via Hub Pages

Really. I can’t really express how much I don’t want physical gifts. If I show up to the wedding and there’s a pile like that, I might just flip out. (OK, I won’t flip out, I promise.) But what am I supposed to DO with gifts? Cram them into my already overweight luggage? Pay to ship them to Switzerland? Frantically try to return them to stores on Sunday before we fly away!?

Best-case scenario of the gift giving is that some kind folk would ship something to our house in Switzerland (with that handy address we put on the invites!) because they really want us to have some wedding bath towels or whatever. Worst-case scenario is someone gifting us a blender and expecting that A.) You can use this in Switzerland with the electricity, and B.) We are happy to fit said blender in our carry-on as we backpack around Hawaii.

Thaaanks. / Image via harsharajgatty.wordpress.com

Mama Funnel Cake and friends understood why we wouldn’t want to deal with gifts when we fly in for the wedding, but they didn’t understand why we didn’t want to set up a local registry in Switzerland, which…in theory was possible. There’s middle-case scenario: we get all this lovely wedding china for gifts and then in two years when we move, we sell it all. The wedding bathroom towels? We’re SELLING THEM! (No mercy!) OK, so maybe you understand a bit more why we are in an anti-materialism phase right now.

We didn’t want to be pushy about our desire for cash-only gifts, so we made no mention of wish lists or registries in our invites. (Which is bad etiquette anyway, right?) Instead we made a webpage on our wedding site so any curious soul who wondered if we did indeed have a wedding registry would not be confused about our desires.

Ms. Ferris Wheel told me about the wonderful idea of a Honeyfund, which is exactly what I wanted! A gift registry for intangible items. You want to give us a gift? That’s great! And here is a way you can give us something we really want that we can fit with us on the plane as well! It was the perfect solution for us, and Mr. Funnel Cake’s parents thought it was genius. (But my mother was maybe a little sad she can’t get us bathroom towels…)

We set up a ton of items on our registry that reflected exactly what we wanted to do on our honeymoon: Relaxing on the beach, hiking, enjoying cocktails, eating out, etc. By the time I had picked all of the “perfect” photos to represent our gifts, I realized I was going to have to pay for the Honeyfund upgrade if I wanted to have the images show up. That is SO sneaky and not appreciated. And normally I would blow it off and go without pictures, but because this is our only registry and the pictures really helped “make” the gifts, I caved (just like the Mobileme purchase) and bought the upgrade.

And because I bought that stupid upgrade, I decided to use one of the ultra cheesy Hawaiian themes only available to paying customers. Getting my damn money’s worth! Harrumph!

Check out some of the items we are asking for:

Before we linked the Honeyfund on our site, we also wrote a little note to help explain in a friendly way why we do not desire physical gifts.

And honestly? I mean all the words up there. If one of the guests has a problem with the idea of giving only money (or is skint on money), I would rather they come with no gift at all. We invited people to the wedding because we want to see them and have them share in the celebration of our union. Certainly not to make a buck. Because, let’s be real folks, this wedding shiz is expensive and we aren’t doing it for the money!

Would you consider doing a honeymoon registry?

*All images are personal unless noted*