Today I received a question from a bride who wanted to know how she should let her guests know about their wedding registry.
“We’ve been wondering how couples typically let their guests know about their wedding gift registry. Is it a part of their mailed invitation, a word of mouth thing, or something else?”
Let it be known: it’s generally frowned upon to put information about gifts or registry into the wedding invitation. The reason is that you would never imply that your guest wasn’t welcome without a gift, right? Nor that attending your wedding comes with an obligation to give a gift. The focus of a wedding invitation should never be on gifts.
That being said, most everyone attending will want to fete you and shower you with blessings and gifts! So you should definitely register for gifts if you want them. But how to let people know about your registry, since you’re not supposed to put it in the invitation?
There are two ways: old-school word of mouth, and new-school wedding websites. Both are etiquette-correct. Simply let your family and friends know where you are registered, and if a guest asks them, your besties/familia can pass the word along.
Or, list it on your wedding website on a secondary page, not the home page. This way, your wedding website acts as your etiquettely-correct, 21st-century word-of-mouth, since by clicking on a link to your registry, your guest is inquiring where you are registered and it’s not you pushing the information at them. And you CAN include a link to your wedding website in the invitation, as long as, again, the focus of the website isn’t the wedding registry but information about the wedding overall such as maps, directions, and the like.
Updated 9/17/2020 by Emee Pumarega.
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