Never had a 3 day labor, never was so blessed. My step mother got all offended because I hadn’t specifically invited her. Um, she was my Dad’s wife, of course she was included in the invite we sent to him.
She came, but I had a phone call from my sister to ask if I knew I’d really offended my step mother…?
The last party we gave, the invites went to (primary person, if only 1 was our friend) and guest. Or, both names. That was over 10 years ago, which shows how much I like hosting anything!
The only reason we considered a destination wedding was to hopefully limit the number of people who would be able to attend because I did not want a wedding but was having one for family politics. So that’s another reason some people choose a lavish location - they know people don’t have the means to attend. 
We’ve just been invited to our first wedding in years and really the first one since being wealthy. I’m still thinking we’ll spend about $100 on a gift if we attend because we’ll have to travel. We may increase the amount if we don’t attend.
I definitely wouldn’t begrudge anyone not being able to afford a wedding gift for someone close to them 
I’m sure many/all of us have been there or are there now.
I can’t imagine anyone who would rather have someone close to them skip a wedding because they can’t afford a gift, vs. come and bring no gift or something small. Or, I can imagine that person and they suck!
(My question was more about the blanket, I don’t do wedding gifts, vs. not being able to imagine a situation where someone might not be able to swing it.)
I know some people who are in families where they are kind of forced into a bigger wedding circuit- so some people our generation are going to each other’s weddings and mutually not doing gifts because it’s either adding to clutter or it’s kind of the same money recirculating. I don’t have any kind of a policy personally, but I rarely get invited to weddings these days.
And re: gifts for already cohabiting established people getting married - if g and I go ahead with the wedding at some point I’d be embarrassed to get anything bigger than a bunch of flowers or box or tea. Even if we rented a space and did catering. My grandad would send a cheque but he sends a cheque for everything and I don’t cash them for the most part
But white weddings with all the trimmings are a different beast and different expectations. I did one once and tried to avoid the gifts and registry/created an alternative registry and asked for second hand etc. it was a mess and not great for me.
Whoa that seems like a lot to me! I usually spend $50-100.
I kind of took my cues from what people gave us because I was the first in my friend group to get married. Most couples gave us $200-$400 but keep in mind this is the NYC area and they were all six figure earners. I think things are a lot more formal out here in general. My bff from the Midwest didn’t gift us anything because I told her I knew how much she was spending to just, get there. I think I gave her like $250 when she got married, she didn’t have a wedding so it was much less than I’d have spent on traveling to her, etc. On the weekend she came she still insisted on buying groceries for one of the nights, but I paid for everyone’s accommodations and the rest of the food. Probably culture on this varies a lot. My family is really generous with gifts though! And I love giving gifts. I do $50-$100 for most other holidays though, like birthdays, etc.
Ok, here is my real wedding etiquette complaint. Why can’t you see into the future when deciding which weddings to go to vs. skip? I went to a childhood friend’s wedding who I’ve hardly seen since then/had to skip much more fun other plans that weekend, and decided to skip the wedding of someone who is now one of my best friends. Someone needs to fix this.
Gifts I received for my wedding ranged from a single potato masher (came with a card and a joke that I still think of when I use it) to a $2,000 check from my sister’s dad.
Now I will give a small ($20 to 50) gift off the registry if going to a shower and then I write a check for the wedding with ideas on how they can use it (cool restaurants at their honeymoon destination/home reno stuff they’ve mentioned/self care destressing stuff for post wedding let down). Checks have ranged from $100 to $300, depending on how close we are to the folks getting married.
My best friend’s little sister got married recently and though we weren’t invited to the wedding, we sent a very nice registry gift in the $100 range.
Think about how much it costs for two people to eat a three course meal at a nice restaurant. Now add 30%, because there’s a wedding upcharge lol. You don’t have to agree with it, but I’ve heard that wedding guests should try to offset the cost of their meal with the gift. Gifts of around $200 from a couple are pretty normal in my experience.
ETA: this is if you attend the wedding. If not, it ranges probably depending on how close you are to the people getting married.
We were grown adults trying to figure out how to deal with all the stuff from two households. We asked for donations to the charity at whose event we met, and I enlisted my mother to reinforce that, with retellings of the story of our meeting as needed. I don’t even know for sure who donated and who didn’t, and I’m quite happy with that. I know there were a couple very large donations, but the donors would have given a lot to that charity in the first place. Still, we got several t-shirts as a thank-you from the charity, which was fun.
I don’t remember what we did at the most recent wedding wedding we went to (for a niece). Something off the registry, but no idea how much (his niece). It was probably close to ten years ago now.
ETA though I have no earthly idea what a three course meal at a nice restaurant costs. Luckily neither do any of our relatives! I think we are talking about very different cultures. Just for example, I have heard that alcohol is sometimes served at weddings/receptions? This is not something I have witnessed.
Almost every wedding I’ve ever been to has had an open bar, and the ones that haven’t have had stashes of beer and wine. There really are such big differences, even within the US!
Random note to add as someone who just hosted a fairly traditional wedding in April 2022: if you’re giving a monetary gift for a wedding, give cash OR a check made out to only one party. Don’t assume peoples names will change, have changed, or that they already bank together. There are some checks I can’t cash because they’re made out to both DH and I, or just to me but with my new last name, but changing your name can take a few months. So go with cash if you’d rather not be watching your checking for months on end lol
Yes! I was a bank teller back in the day, and I had to be massively annoying to lots of newlyweds. Not my rules sorry!
And every bank has different arbitrary rules, like mine would deposit things if DH was there and signed the back with his license number, but his will absolutely not allow it. Wacky!!!
Ha we just had our first experience with this! Got a check from my great aunt made out to both of us with our last names hyphenated but luckily it was accepted with no problem through mobile deposit
That is so weird - we received tons of checks in varying names and my husband was able to deposit all of them even into accounts he wasn’t yet added to, in my maiden or new name, or both, or his own. I thought we would run into all of those issues, but no, none at all.
You definitely got lucky!!!
Also I am finding this discussion fascinating while in the middle of wedding planning. We’ve given about $100 as a couple for most recent weddings but less than that when we were younger and poorer. Most gifts we’ve gotten so far have been about that or a little more, with some very generous outliers from older relatives.
Also interesting to see people say they would spend more on a gift if not attending the wedding - I have never thought to send a gift if I wasn’t able to attend and have been surprised that we’ve gotten several so far from people not able to make it!
Growing up my family weddings (Polish/Catholic) were HUGE drinking events. Definitely open bar, (and usually a full bar). Usually pre-drinking, drinking between the wedding and the reception, and drinking at the reception until very late. They’d sometimes bring in “sober up snacks” toward the end of the night. Same was true for friends who got married in their 20s, probably because most of those were funded by parents.
With weddings now among my peers I’m seeing more people have limited drinks available (like 2-3 kinds of beer, wine, and a special cocktail or something).
One of Howie’s friends had a wedding where the beer was free but you had to pay for soda and water. I still give Howie crap about that. (I think it was supposed to be a cash bar for everything but then they had beer leftover from the rehearsal dinner so just made it free. Still, it seemed bonkers that Howie could get a free beer and I was supposed to pay $3 for a Diet Coke.)
The first wedding I went to where there wasn’t alcohol was that of a very religious coworker and it was so foreign to me!
Yeah, not even thinking about religious weddings - it’s just not common to have alcohol here. Lots of venues won’t allow it, and of course, when I was the age where contemporaries were getting married, lots of counties were dry.