December Wedding

More than thirty years ago now my husband and I had a December wedding. I’ve finally begun to notice that a lot of my friends also had December weddings. So, maybe this is a good time to talk about giving gifts that aren’t for Christmas this time of year.

What are good wedding gifts for a couple who gets married just before Christmas? One of our gifts that we are still thankful for on an almost daily basis is a simple crock for holding kitchen utensils. It isn’t imaginative, but it is extremely handy and got us started right away on a habit of having things that we use frequently right out where we can find them easily! My maid of honor got us this gift, though she signed the card as coming from her parents and the rest of the family, but I know her parents were traveling home from Alaska just before my wedding and wouldn’t have had time to shop, so I know this great gift idea came from Cyndi.

Another unimaginative extremely useful gift was towels. We were college students, we had one, maybe two towels each – we needed those boring things! In my experience newlyweds take a lot of showers. We also got sheets. I can tell you exactly who got us those sheets – Muriel Martin – and I remember it because I hadn’t given bed-sheets a single thought while I was making my wedding preparations. I didn’t even know what size mattress we had on our bed! That was a great gift, as was the gift certificate from my sister-in-law at Christmas which we used to buy more sheets – newlyweds change the sheets a lot, too.

I also really appreciated candle holders and candles because I was a romantic bride who wanted to make candlelight dinners for my husband. That can be a dangerous pastime without the correct equipment. I tried making some of my own, which was not my most brilliant idea, so I was grateful for the proper candle-holders we were given.

One thing we were NOT given that we really wanted and felt like we needed was a clock. When you have one you think of it as just an average wall clock. When you don’t have a clock your eyes get frustrated searching the walls for the time and you quickly begin to believe that a basic, everyday wall clock is essential to getting to college classes on time. When my aunt asked us a couple of months after the wedding what we hadn’t gotten that we needed “a clock” was my first and only response.

What newlyweds don’t need is casserole dishes.  That was especially true in my case because between my mother-in-law and my grandmother I wasn’t allowed to take food to any potluck until the military moved my husband and I to a base a thousand miles from home!  We got about six casserole dishes as wedding gifts.  I still have too many casserole dishes – even after raising four daughters and moving around a lot with the military. Those casserole dishes don’t break as easily as you might think.

Newlyweds also don’t need electric can-openers. No one does. That is my one “green” pet-peeve, and it’s mostly because I don’t like listening to the electric motor whine. It always seemed to me that it was actually faster to use a wall-mounted hand can-opener than to use my electric opener – all I really liked was the magnet on my electric can-opener, and the newer wall-mounted hand cranked openers come from the store with magnets already attached.

My last gift idea for December newlyweds is gift cards for boringly useful things – like a tank of gas when they get back from their honeymoon and have no money to make it to the end of the month, or maybe for a dry-cleaning service to have the tuxes or wedding gown professionally cleaned and stored, or for books at their college bookstore, or extra minutes on their cell-phone plan.

There is no shame in giving a boring gift as long as it is useful. We certainly got our share of lovely and/or imaginative gifts, but most of those I can’t remember who gave them to us, or I can’t remember using them for more than one or two times. For example, we got the cutest, tiniest cut-glass salt and pepper shakers I have ever seen – still, we have only used them once. We also got silver napkin rings in the shape of roses – I think we’ve used those twice.

For wedding gifts this December I ask you to be memorably boring and get gifts that your bride and groom will use and use and will happily never have to admit to their mothers-in-law that they lacked the foresight to have on hand.