Brownie28 wrote:
Doesn't it totally depend on the couple? Someone I'm very close with - sibling or best friend - I'll do something custom, in fact for my sister who just got married I got her this cool wall hanging that gives the date and a picture of the location where they met, got engaged and got married (and the last two were very meaningful locations). If it's anyone else I'll see if anything off the registry looks decent, otherwise it's cash.
For sure. I've given some custom personalized items to close friends/family, but otherwise typically browse the registry for something I think would be useful/worthwhile. Travel also matters... Of course nowadays some people will just register on Amazon so whatever you get can simply be shipped to them directly, but in the past I preferred to wrap, etc, and bring it myself, so that limited what I could carry if we needed to fly there. In that case, cash is always a viable backup option.
We just got an invitation last week, in fact. Since we expect 5 of us to attend in our party, my wife went w/ the $50/head estimate and so shopped their registry for something in the $250 ballpark that we felt would be useful and last awhile (I sometimes think of it like, "If/when they get divorced, would at least one of them actually make it a point to want to keep that?" but since it was on the wife's side of the family I obviously didn't say that out loud) and ended up on a $299 Yeti cooler. I know Yetis are kinda extravagant, but it's still something that should serve its purpose for many years.