October marks our five-year wedding anniversary. How time flies! I can never quite remember the exact date - whether it's the 5th or the 6th - but it's there, it exists, and photos mounted in silver frames dotted around our home remind me so: me, in a lace blue dress; him, in a dark blue suit; us, against the backdrop of the Great Orme looming behind us.
Although we eloped (you can read our elopement story here), we celebrated with friends and family at two transatlantic receptions - but we didn't have a wedding registry or a honeymoon fund.
In Seattle, we asked our guests not to bring gifts (though friends and family generously slipped checks and crisp bills into congratulatory cards) and in Oxford, we asked that donations be given in lieu of gifts to Trinity Hospice, where John's uncle Chris (who became my dear friend shortly after my move down to London) passed away.
We didn't have a wedding registry for a few reasons. Mostly, we felt a bit funny about the whole thing (though I don't blink twice when ordering a muffin tin or china set for friends' weddings) i.e. having a list of things we wanted and asking (or, rather, expecting) our guests to buy them for us.
Perhaps the biggest reason why we didn't have a wedding registry, was the fact that we'd been moving from flat to flat for years, and still didn't have a place to call our own when we were married, let alone a rental agreement long enough to last more than a year (it was a time when the housing market in London went insane and house prices went £100k+ above the asking price, so our landlords would inevitably sell at the end of our lease) - we simply wouldn't have space for the items we'd longed for.
Finally (and perhaps the biggest reason why I'm glad we didn't have a wedding registry), our tastes have changed so much from five years ago. Of course, I would have loved to have (I think we asked for John Lewis gift cards at Christmas for about three years straight) house-related gifts when we moved into the house we bought two years ago, but even the things I thought worked in our home then, don't really translate into what we know works for us now.
Either way, I don't really care or judge whether friends have a wedding registry/honeymoon fund or not (although a 'thank you' note is always appreciated!) - it just wasn't for us at the time.
How about you? If you're married, did you have a wedding registry or honeymoon fund? Or a chosen charity to donate to? I'd love to know!
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