Another Fucking Wedding

ZOMG! Greatest Anniversary Present Evar!

The theme for the traditional first anniversary gift is paper, so I assume that most modern couples trade checks or throw cash at each other or something. I decided to honor tradition by having a non-paper gift wrapped in paper, which probably doesn't really count.

Carrie, on the other hand, went with the best possible gift: my football-indifferent (at best) wife bought a pair of tickets to see my beloved New Orleans Saints in the Superdome. This means we are going to have a nice romantic December weekend in the Crescent City and I will finally get to see my Who Dats play on their home field, in front of the crazy home fans.

If I thought for a million years I would never have come up with as perfect a gift for myself. It is this kind of thing that has made the first year together as husband and wife so amazing. Happy Anniversary, Carrie. I'm lucky to have you.

(NB: If you print out this love note, it counts as a paper gift.)

The NYT's odd promotion of wedding planners

Today's New York Times had an article that seemed right up our alley: planning a wedding on a budget. People (like us) looking to make their wedding affordable in the face of cultural pressure, high prices and escalating expectations. And how does the New York Times solve the conundrum? A wedding planner.

It isn't that the New York Times didn't recognize the issue, they just don't acknowledge it:

Carley Roney, co-founder of TheKnot.com, which helps brides-to-be plan their weddings, says she doesn’t think so. “You give them a budget, and their job is to make the wedding happen in that budget,” she said. “By not overspending, they can save thousands of dollars.”

See, that's probably true. But if you are considering the category of things that a wedding planner can save you "thousands of dollars" on for your wedding, you are not having a wedding on a budget. You are having a wedding with a budget. The only mention of a person who is actually doing a wedding on a budget makes no mention at all of having a wedding planner involved.

But what really got me was this quote from a wedding planner:

Ms. Seccuro said she would never forget one couple who, when it was time to register for gifts, “actually sent blueprints of a house they were building upstate to all the wedding guests, inviting them to ‘buy’ a door, a window, the kitchen floors, an appliance.” They “wanted their guests to pay for their house,” she said. “They remain to this date the only client I have fired.”

Fired? Frankly, having the guests "buy the house" sounds like a brilliant idea! Certainly it is a better idea than ending up with piles of crystal serving trays or Lladro figurines.

If that is the kind of thing wedding planners disapprove of, that's one more reason we're glad we didn't hire a wedding planner. (Otherwise, we'd never getting away with registering for a dehumidifier.)

An alternative to traditional wedding registries

It will no doubt shock and disappoint some of my Stay Free! readers to learn that I don't despise gift registries--quite the contrary, I embrace them! ... both as a giver and as a receiver.

Still, the annoying thing about registries is that you're generally limited to chain stores that I otherwise wouldn't frequent. So I've been wondering if there's a DIY registry online that allows you to list things from local stores, and I've found it: FindGift.com. This site allows you to list anything, be it from a local indie store or some website. You can specify as many or few details as you want: "model X lamp in X color from Cog & Pearl at 190 Avenue in Park Slope" or simply "a boombox." Thus, it not only allows your people to buy from local, independent businesses, it allows them, in some cases, to comparison shop.

The downside: gift-givers will need to remember to click off the item they bought or else you'll end up with duplicates. Since you usually get duplicates from regular registries anyway, I'm not sure how much that matters, but if the store doesn't have a customer-friendlly return policy, it'll be a real hassle. Perhaps the best way to use this, then, is to make sure any store you include has a decent return policy. And you can always use it in conjunction with standard registries (which is what we'll be doing).