Author Archives: Victoria Pratt

Registries, Wedding Gifts, and Thank You Notes

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Because we all know what weddings are really about. [via Wikimedia Commons]

I’ve saved my post about gifts and gift registries for last because they are the least important part of your wedding. Yet somehow they get quite a lot of attention on etiquette sites and in the news.

Here’s the thing, yes you are going to get gifts because that is what is done. However, gifts for weddings are completely optional, the amount a guest spends on their gift is up to them (I don’t ever want to hear the words “cover your plate” coming out of the mouth of a couple about their own wedding), AND what a guest chooses to give you is also up them.

Registries

Back in the day, a bride would go down to the department store in her hometown and pick out a china pattern and a silver pattern (this means the design on your knives and forks, btw). The store would note it down and when people came in to buy the bride a gift, the store could tell them what patterns she had chosen and they could select a place setting or two and be on their way. And that was the beginning of registries.

Now, you can register for anything your little heart desires. This is great! Not everyone needs 12 settings of Wedgewood china and Waterford crystal. However it also creates some confusion about what a registry really is.

A registry is a list of IDEAS. It can also be somewhat helpful in preventing a couple from receiving 5 toasters (has this really ever happened? Why is the example always toasters? ED NOTE: I got two waffle irons! No toasters yet -Jaya). A registry is not a list of demands or a shopping list for guests to pick from. Guests can absolutely get you things that aren’t on your registry.

Now if you are going to set one up, try to come up with items in a range of prices and try to come up with enough items that guests feel like they have some options.

Alternative Registries

Every day it seems that a new entrepreneurial has created a new way to do online registries. A popular version is the honeymoon registry. While many of your elderly relatives might be heartily offended by these types of registries, they are growing in popularity and are now generally accepted even by etiquette experts (such as the Emily Post Institute). However, there are good ways and bad ways to do a honeymoon registry.

A good way is to list a number of experiences you want to enjoy on the honeymoon- things that feel like real gifts, not just chipping in for airfare. Then, if you receive your “massage on the beach” or whatever, you should do you best to actually do that activity, even though the honeymoon registry company basically just gives you a big check at the end.

A bad way to do it is to just have a general fund that all the guests deposit money into- feels more like you are collecting cash rather than receiving gifts. You should also do what you can to make sure any fees are paid directly by you rather than passing them on to your guests.

Another new registry type is where you list the things you want and guests contribute money to those items through the site. For example, you want a KitchenAid Mixer (it’s not a registry without a KitchenAid, amirite?), but you know that no one will be able to buy you one for $400. So you split it up and ask for 4 gifts of $100 each for the mixer. This is pretty cool! Just like chipping in for a group gift but with less hassle. However, if you are asking for all this stuff, you should do your best to actually buy the things you are asking for when you get your big check at the end. If you are using these registries to trick your guests into giving you cash when they think they are buying you a mixer that you will bake Christmas cookies for years with, then that is extremely shady and you shouldn’t be doing it.

Asking For Cash

That brings me to my next point, cash. Cash is great, everyone loves it! It’s so great that everyone already knows you might like it, so you don’t need to ask for it. I mean think about it, here’s this list of items you might like for your newly wedded home and then at the bottom, you are like, “cash is good too!” Umm, duh.

However, you don’t have to despair. You can get the word around by word of mouth- tell your mother, tell your partner’s mother, tell your bridal party. And if someone ASKS you what you want, it’s totally fine to say “oh we are saving up for a house, so we would really love some money for that, but anything you want to give us is great!” It just doesn’t belong on a list. And if you don’t make a registry, many people will infer that you would prefer cash (though you might end up with some really hideous and/or memorable gifts as well.)

Getting the Word Out

So you’ve made this carefully curated registry. Now how do you let everyone know about it? Traditionally, it was all spread by word of mouth. Your aunt would call up your mom and ask her where you were registered and your mom would tell her. This still works! And again, if someone asks you where you are registered, you can tell them.

The one thing you do not want to do is include any mention of gifts or registries on the invitation. The invitation is all about wanting the guest to come share your day, not about what they are going to give you. This includes “no gifts please,” the point is to not talk about gifts, even not wanting them.

A really excellent place for registry information is on your wedding website, under its own discreet link. This creates a polite layer in which the guest is seeking out information that they want, you are not waving it in their face telling them to buy you stuff.

The Gifts Start Rolling In

It might surprise you at how soon after you announce your engagement that gifts start showing up at your door, so be prepared.

It is traditional that you don’t use your wedding gifts until after the wedding. The reason for this is that, if something should happen and the wedding is called off, those gifts must be returned to the giver!

Make sure you keep track of who sent you what- spreadsheets are great for this! This way makes it easier to send thank you notes.

Thank You Notes

Handwritten thank you notes are absolutely mandatory for wedding gifts. Even if you called them or thanked them in person, you still need to send a note. Wedding gift giving is a sort of formalized gift giving tradition that is basically required of all your guests. Therefore it deserves a formal thank you in return.

For gifts that arrive prior to your wedding, you want to send out a thank you within 2-3 weeks of receiving the gift (so they know it arrived safely!). DO NOT wait until after your wedding to send these notes. You are going to want to break up the note writing as much as possible so you don’t have to do 100 at once!

For anything that arrives shortly before your wedding, on the day, or afterwards, you only have 3-4 months tops to get them done. A year is a MYTH. Just do it and you can enjoy married life without the Sword of Thank You Notes Yet To Be Written hanging over your head.

 

I hope you all have enjoyed my series on How to Throw a Perfectly Polite Wedding. Be sure to check out all the earlier posts as well!

The Wedding Guest List

Wedding Invitations

The Care and Keeping of Wedding Attendants

Showers, Bachelor/ette Parties, and Rehearsal Dinners, Oh My!

Wedding Ceremony Etiquette

Wedding Reception Etiquette

Nancy Mitford and U vs Non-U Speech

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Nancy Mitford calling to say you sound like a pleb. [Via]

Obviously, I think that etiquette and manners today has nothing to do with wealth or social class- manners are for everyone! Historically, however, the rise of etiquette books in the Victorian period had a lot to do with the growing middle class and their desire to act like the upper classes. So someone had to teach them how to act. But then the rich caught onto this and constantly changed the rules to throw the middle classes off. Nice, huh? The moral of the story, is that there was (is?) a way to tell social class, regardless of money or education.

In the 1950s, Nancy Mitford (of the endlessly fascinating Mitford sisters), borrowed an idea from British linguist Alan S. C. Ross about U vs non-U vocabulary and wrote a very popular essay about it, “The English Aristocracy,” in which she gave a list of words that were Upper Class (U) and their non-U (not Upper Class) counterparts. She argues that with the Upper Classes in Britain no longer being necessarily richer or better educated than anyone else, their language was the only thing left to distinguish them as Upper Class/aristocratic.

A selection:

U
Bike
Vegetables
A Nice House
Graveyard
Die
Jam
Napkin
Sofa
Rich
Lunch then Dinner
Non-U
Cycle
Greens
A Lovely Home
Cemetery
Pass on
Preserve
Serviette
Settee or Couch
Wealthy
Dinner then Supper (except U-children and U-dogs also have these meals!) [ed. this is my fave]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interestingly, Emily Post had her own list of “U vs Non-U” vocabulary in 1920 (30 years before Nancy Mitford’s famous essay). Some of Emily’s choices:

U
At our house we go to bed early (or get up)
Beautiful house—or place
Went to
Gave him a dinner
Had something to drink
Wash
Non-U
In our residence we retire early (or arise)
Elegant home
Attended
Tendered him a banquet
Partook of liquid refreshment
Perform ablutions

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps you will notice a pattern in both the Mitford and Post lists- a large portion of the “non-U” word choices are pretentious and overly wordy. Mitford actually says that the “non-U” speakers are mostly among the middle class- the lower classes tend to use the same words as the U speakers. The reason for this is that the lower and upper classes were pretty comfortable with their station and it was only the middle classes that were striving to “better themselves” by using fancy words that they thought sounded upper class.

Now, Mitford’s essay wasn’t completely accepted as truth, even at the time. Evelyn Waugh wrote a rebuttal essay that was published in Noblesse Oblige: a book containing Mitford’s essay, the original article by Ross, Waugh’s rebuttal, and other related essays. Waugh argues that these “U” and “Non-U” differences don’t actually exist as language is constantly in a state of flux and is also regional and family specific.

Today, especially in America, I don’t think you can pick out any words as being specifically upper vs middle class (unless you are the type of person to see entire regions as more lower class than the region you live in!), our culture is too homogenized for that, and it seems that differences are more regional and generational.  Though in 1983, Paul Fussell argued that America does have a class system in Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. His benchmarks for upper, middle, and lower class were: the upper class says “Grandpa died,” the middle class says “Grandpa passed away,” and the lower class says “Grandpa went to Jesus.”

However, I think the point about pretension vs being comfortable with yourself absolutely does exist, and for that reason, Emily Post’s list seems to hold up pretty well. Pretension is sort of rude because it is extreeeemely annoying- we all know someone who uses “myself” instead of “me” (incorrectly) and other big words that they don’t seem to know the meaning of, or they just talk in a roundabout manner of “needing to equip themselves with the necessary instruments of learning” instead of “buying school supplies.” This kind of thing makes everyone uncomfortable, and as we all know, causing discomfort in others is one of the hallmarks of rudeness.

What say you? Is pretension rude? Are there any words or phrases that you would argue are definitively class-based? Are middle class people in Britain really trying to act working class? Tell me in the comments!!

Door Etiquette

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Revolving doors strike terror into the hearts of the impolite. via Wikimedia Commons

Regular Doors:

This is really basic stuff, but apparently it needs to be said:

  • Hold doors for anyone coming behind you.
  • Especially hold doors for someone who has their arms full.
  • Say “thank you” if someone holds a door for you.
  • Don’t slam doors.
  • Don’t stop once you are on the other side of the door. Someone might be right behind you.
  • Along the same lines, don’t stand in front of doors.

Revolving Doors:

There are a lot of revolving doors in New York City and apparently no one knows how to use them, from what I’ve been witnessing lately.

  • If you are in a revolving door, you must push! Don’t rely on someone else to do it for you.
  • One person per slot (unless you are with a small child). You do not fit and you are slowing the whole process down.
  • Go with the flow of the door, don’t try to walk the opposite way that everyone else is pushing.
  • If you have an option between a revolving door and a regular door when entering a building (especially in winter and summer) you should choose the revolving door as it keeps the heat/air-conditioning in better.
  • Don’t stop once you exit the door, you are even more likely to be run into than with a regular door.
  • Technically, traditionally, if a man and a woman are entering a revolving door, the man should actually go first so that he can get the thing moving since he is physically stronger. These days, your mileage may vary with this.

Wedding Reception Etiquette

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Is it just me or do these intense wedding reception setups make you feel kind of nervous and claustrophobic? [via Wikimedia Commons]

Receptions are the really fun part of weddings but they can also be the most complicated and fraught with etiquette conundrums. Etiquette doesn’t care about what your decorations are, your colors, how many people you invite, whether you have a band, a DJ, or an iPod, or which of the zillions of traditions you want to include. There are a million websites and books out there to help you decide on the style of your reception. But there are a few etiquette points that are important to keep in mind.

Reception Timing and Meals:

Often, your ceremony venue will have specific times that you are allowed to be there, this is especially true for churches. What do you do when your ceremony has to be at 2pm and you want to have an evening dinner reception?

Typically, you should do your best to avoid a gap, but they can be unavoidable. If you must have a gap and your wedding site is too far away for most guests to return to their homes/hotels, you need to have something for them to do in the meantime- many couples will have a longer cocktail hour at the reception venue to fill the time. Gaps are especially rude if you use them as a way to avoid paying for a meal for your guests- for example, having a wedding at 3pm and then having a “cocktail reception” starting at 8pm.

This leads me to my next point, you need to provide a proper meal if your wedding takes place over a mealtime, or be ready to expect some grumpy and hungry guests who order pizza and eat it in a parking lot (it happened on an episode of Four Weddings). If your ceremony starts at 4 or 5pm and is immediately followed by a reception that goes until 9, 10, or later, you need to provide a full meal of some kind. It is very poor hospitality to expect people to be spending 5, 6, or more hours on your wedding and not eat a real meal in that time. Now, very very heavy finger foods and appetizers can certainly count, but only if it is truly enough to fill up hungry bellies.

If you can’t afford to provide a full dinner for your drinking and dancing late into the night reception, then you need to consider other options:

  • A ceremony followed by a simple 2 hour cake and punch reception is a perfectly proper celebration for a wedding on a budget. Have the wedding at 2 and everyone is gone by 5 and you have no etiquette faux pas.
  • A morning wedding followed by a brunch or lunch reception gives you the ability to provide a nice meal which is usually much cheaper than a full dinner.
  • A very late evening wedding with the ceremony starting at 8 and followed by snacks, cake, drinking, and dancing late into the night.
  • A dinner reception with more casual foods- you don’t need to serve a choice between plated rubber chicken and filet mignon. Why not try a big pasta buffet, catered barbeque, takeout Chinese, food trucks, or big sandwich platters? Think outside the box and you will find something that will suit your budget and satisfy your hosting requirements!

It is smart to include a hint of what your reception will be like on your invitation so guests know what to expect ie cocktail reception to follow, dinner and dancing to follow, join us for cake and punch after, etc.

Toasts:

Traditionally, the Best Man and Maid of Honor give toasts at the wedding. Please ask them well in advance if they feel comfortable giving a toast at all. Check out Jaya’s post on toasting etiquette for more!

Seating:

If you are serving a meal, you need to provide seats for all your guests.

You don’t have to have a seating chart or assigned tables, but it can take the pressure off your guests and prevent the “school cafeteria” feeling of “where do I sit?” It also prevents the problem of large groups pulling in chairs to overfill one table and leaving another table with only two chairs for a couple of guests to sit awkwardly.

If you have assigned tables but not assigned seats, you can either have a list posted somewhere or “escort cards,” these are little cards (or something else more creative!) that have the guests’ names on them. They pick them up before going in to dinner and see what table they are at. If you have assigned seats, just use normal placecards at each person’s seat.

Receiving Lines:

You don’t often see receiving lines anymore (or at least not in my circle!). Most couples have opted to skip them in favor of going around to each table during the reception. Whichever you choose, you must do something to ensure that you speak to each guest for at least a moment during the wedding. Even though it seems like it would take a long time, the receiving line might actually be faster and allow you to enjoy more of the reception than trying to greet each person while they eat and reduces the risk that you will miss someone.

For the logistics: you either have the receiving line immediately after the ceremony and guests go through it as they exit the ceremony and go to the reception or you have it at the reception as everyone goes into dinner. Obviously, the couple needs to be in the line, but usually their parents and often the attendants will stand in it as well.

You needn’t do more than greet each guest and thank them for coming. After that, move them right along to the next person to keep the line moving.

Cash Bars:

I am going to take a very strong stance here and say that at American weddings, cash bars are always against general etiquette. Think about it: a wedding reception is essentially a thank you gift for your guests for taking part in your Important Life Event, and you shouldn’t ask anyone to pay for part of a gift. Also, it has always seemed strange to me that alcohol is the one area people feel comfortable asking others to chip in for. If you wouldn’t ask someone to pay for their dinner or their share of the cake, you shouldn’t have a cash bar. You are the host; you have to pay for everything associated with your event.

That being said, you are not required to serve alcohol at your wedding. You are also not required to have a full open bar; beer, wine, and soft drinks are a perfectly acceptable and cheaper option. Anyone who complains about your hospitality is being rude.

Another problem with cash bars is that it creates a situation in which some guests have something that the other guests do not because they can afford to pay for it. All of your guests should receive exactly equal food and drink and it is extremely rude to flash differences in their faces.

If you even THINK of having a cash bar for ALL drinks including soft drinks, then, I don’t even know what to do with you. (I have never seen this in real life, but it happened once on another episode of Four Weddings. That show is a mess.)

Of course, you are welcome to do what works in your community and if every single wedding you have every attended has had a cash bar, then you are probably okay.

Money Dances/Wishing Wells:

In a few cultures, money dances are traditional and therefore acceptable. General American culture is not one of them. In traditional American culture, your guests have already purchased a present or given you a check, so why are you asking them to give you even more?

Reception Activities:

Weddings have many fun traditions such as special dances, cake cutting, and bouquet and garter tossing. You can choose to have these as you wish, and don’t let anyone pressure you either way. However, some thoughts:

  • If you decide to do a garter throw/bouquet toss, do NOT force people to participate and don’t let anyone drag all the single people out onto the floor. Personally, I would also recommend keeping the retrieval of the garter tasteful, but you should do what works for you. And if you want your groom crawling up under your skirt to porno music in front of your grandma, that’s your business.
  • I have seen the first dance/father daughter dance occur between the cocktail hour and dinner, but traditionally they happened immediately after the dinner and toasts and opened up the floor to dancing. I have also been to weddings where there was dancing between each course of the dinner, so in those cases, you don’t really need to open the dance floor. Just be thoughtful about how you are scheduling activities and how they will help your event flow.
  • Some modern couples are opting to do a “marriage dance” where all the couples dance and the DJ has them sit down in order of how recently they have been married and then the couple who has been married the longest gets the bouquet. This can be a nice alternative to a bouquet toss which makes single people feel put on display, but at the same time, it excludes single people entirely. Basically you can’t win, so go with what works for you. Or start a new tradition where the whole reception has to try to catch the bouquet? Or you hide the bouquet and there is a search for it? So many possibilities.
  • If you are Jewish, you might want to dance the Hora. Presumably, you already know how to do this, but if you are having a lot of people at your wedding who have never done it before there are a couple things you might want to remember:
    • Everyone is allowed to join in! But your gentile friends might not know what to do, so make sure there are enough people around to show them the ropes.
    • Only the bride and groom go up in the chairs (though we’ve been to Jewish weddings where the parents went up too). Make sure the people lifting you know to keep you close enough together that you can both hold onto the napkin (“schmatta”).
    • Don’t use folding chairs for this activity unless you want to lose a finger!
    • (H/T to my good friend Rachel at whose wedding I had my first Hora experience and who was kind enough to answer my questions.)
  • Cutting the cake: this is pretty simple- the couple goes over to the cake, hold the knife together and cut a small slice. Then they feed it to each other and pose for pictures. Smashing the cake into each others faces is a thing in some places, and it’s totally at your discretion, but definitely don’t do it if one half of the happy couple doesn’t want to! Icing on that $4,000 dress!!
  • Reception activities should happen fairly quickly after dinner and end with the cake cutting. If you are having a “sending off” you can do the bouquet toss/garter throw immediately before you leave. (This is actually more traditional than having the bouquet toss randomly in the middle of your dance- originally it was more of a “just toss the bouquet in the direction of your girlfriends as you head out the door” type of thing than an event that everyone gathered around to watch.)
  • Have your MC announce when these activities are taking place as people will want to watch.

Ending the Reception:

Back in the day when parents hosted the wedding and the couple was the guest of honor, the couple would be expected to leave the reception before it was completely over. They might even change into “going away clothes” and there would be a big sending off as they left on their honeymoon. Then the guests would know that they could leave and everyone would start clearing out.

Now, often, the couple has paid good money for this party and they want to enjoy it until the bitter end. This can create a conflict with some older and more traditional guests who feel like they absolutely have to stay until the bride and groom leave. Nowadays, most people know that the cake cutting signifies the end of official reception activities and that people are free to leave anytime after that, so you might consider making sure that it is the end of official activities or even having your DJ or band leader announce that it is “the last activity but to please enjoy the music and dancing until [end time].” You might also want to consider having it (and your other “official” activities) fairly early during the reception in consideration of guests who might need to leave.

Other Things:

  • Apparently it is a tradition for guests to take home the centerpieces? If this doesn’t bother you, that’s great. If you have plans for your centerpieces, warn your caterer/wedding coordinator/family members/etc or maybe put a note under them saying not to take them.
  • Tip your vendors! Make sure either someone is assigned to handle this or you’ve prearranged the tips.

Thank Goodness We Don’t Have to Do That Anymore: Churching

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The author, at a church but not being churched.

The author, at a church but not being churched.

I love Renaissance Faires and hanging out in fake Medieval Times as much as the next person (erm, except for Jaya who does not like it), but outside of awesome turkey legs and jousting, there were a lot of not-so-fun parts. And life especially sucked if you were a woman.

Take for instance, the concept of churching.

Due to some Levitican nonsense about women being impure after childbirth (Leviticus 12:2-8)  and some Virgin Mary copy-catting (Luke 2:22-40), the thing to do in Medieval Times was to stay at home for 40 days after giving birth and then head to the church to be blessed and become pure again.

When it was time to be churched, a woman would go to the Church with her midwife and the other women who had attended the birth. The new mother would have to wear a special veil to show her impure state. Then they would have to wait OUTSIDE for the priest to come perform the ceremony before the new mother was able to enter the Church.

During the 16th century, the Church began to worry that churching was based on Jewish rather than Christian beliefs and in 1549, Edward IV declared that the service must change from a purification to a Thanksgiving (Medieval Times had both misogyny and anti-Semitism, so fun!). Thereafter, the ceremony was more of a blessing of the woman and about being thankful that she had survived giving birth. The most controversial part became the difference in wording to use if the child had or had not survived the birth.

Technically the service still exists in the Catholic Church (and other more orthodox churches too!), but it isn’t commonly practiced. However, apparently, it was still a common practice in parts of Ireland well into the 1970s and was still making women feel ashamed or dirty because of their post-partum state.