I love that I am getting married to the most amazing guy I have ever met, but I loathe the tedium of the planning our wedding. Sean, in all his amazing-ness is hands-on and helpful with everything. Nonetheless, it seems that there is a never ending list of to-dos and not enough time to do it all. When I am overwhelmed (most of the time), I look for comfort and distraction in the form of our various online wedding registries.
The day we got engaged (February 19th of this year), I started opening our registries. For one, many stores like Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma had sweepstakes to win as much as $5000 worth of merchandise for starting a registry with them. Sean and I are paying for the wedding ourselves, so I thought anything extra would help. Furthermore, creating the registries and adding items to them gave me the feeling that I was making some headway in our wedding planning. At the time, I was finishing my final semester of seminary in another state and curating our registries was one of the few tasks I could do remotely.
Many of the registry websites recommend you register for twice the number of items as the number of guests you invite to your wedding. We are estimating that we will invite about 150 people (figuring out the guest list is one of the biggest stressors), so that means 300 items. In reality, we do not have the space for 300 items. We already have appliances that we rarely ever use: an ice cream maker, a waffle maker, a quesadilla maker, a deep fryer, and an expensive juicer that all sit idly in their boxes. Still, its fun to imagine that somehow, some way, if we add it to the list that someone will get us the $500 Vitamix we have convinced ourselves will make our lives somehow better and easier. We do love cooking so most of the items we have added are food and kitchen related. We also added items to help us get and stay organized (The Container Store).
So far, Sean and I have gone to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Williams-Sonoma, and Macy’s to register in person. We had the most thorough experience at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. We worked with the salesperson that is specially designated to assist with registries. She was extremely patient and knowledgeable, asking us questions to determine which products we needed most. In the other stores, we were given the scanner and allowed to add things on our own. At Bed, Bath, and Beyond, the salesperson guided us through most of the store, from the wedding dinnerware to the bedding. Adding items until we were all exhausted. When we were done, she handed us a thick packet, filled with brochures and a printed out copy of our registry. We could probably have stopped there, but Sean liked the ability to scan things himself.
As it stands, we are registered at virtually every store that has a wedding registry, though I think that we will only keep the one we have at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. A lover of all things electronic, Sean wishes that Best Buy had a registry, as he is still wishing for a wall-size television. What’s funny is that in all the questions we have gotten about our wedding, we are seldom asked where we are registered. We do not anticipate that we will get all of the items on our registries, but we will graciously accept whatever our guests gift us with. Still, when it gets hectic, its cool to know that relief, albeit temporary, is just a few clicks away.
