Crappy Gifts and Unappreciative Receivers

I have a few hard rules when I go to a wedding:

#1 always go to the ceremony, screw the party this the reason you should be going

#2- try to avoid looking like an ahole like being the jackoff who thinks this is the ideal time to do some drunken (or often times sober) striptease.  People aren't laughing with you or even at you they are feeling sorry for your wife

 #3- avoid throwing around a football during the cocktail hour, it never ends well

#4- When it comes to the gift don't screw around and just give money in an envelope (preferably cash)

 #5- if it isn't an open bar use the money from the envelope to buy yourself and anybody around you drinks

You have to be a total sap to like wedding ceremonies, so you can call me a total sap as I think it's by far the best part of any wedding.  I have been to a thousand weddings and the party is generally kind of overrated, most people are tired and want to go home and can't stand having to pretend to like the crappy music the bride-and-groom have chosen.   I kind of believe that if the songs you are playing are also played at Sporting Events you are torturing your guests.   Add to that that the food generally blows and the seating arrangements would in most cases have been better if they completely random.

Rules #2 and #3 are pretty self explanatory and I really wish I didn't have to write them down to remind myself to NOT do them, they sound pretty easy to follow but I'm a jerk and I don't do what's right most of the time.

But for all the things I do wrong, I do a few things right and that is the fact that my wife and I don't skimp on the gift and we always give what people want....

I know it's kind of lame but I've had my own wedding and honestly the only thing that made me not want to vomit was cold-hard cash.  It's not that we needed the money but when you get married and you are writing out thousand dollar checks to every vendor in a 50 mile radius, you feel like you need it.  With the astronomical costs of these stupid weddings (which easily run above the cost of my four year in-state college degree) there is this sense that the wedding guests owe it to the newleyweds to help shoulder the load.

Although most people really don't need cash, I justify it like this

The reason I give cash is because it's easy, you don't have to go to some crappy store or some crappy online place to buy some crappy piece of china which was probably made-in-China.

The thoughtful gift at that moment is like an anti-gift, the self-involved couple is overwhelmed and they'll never appreciate the time and thought you put into anything anyway and are probably going to be annoyed so why waste your time trying to be nice.

If you aren't going to give money, at least give something off the registry because at least it's something they kind of want and this way the people who get it can still return it because they probably registered at a place they themselves frequent.

Now say for example that somebody goes to a wedding and decides against the Righetti suggestion of giving money and also goes against the company line of a gift from the registry and instead goes and gives a gift they picked out all on their own.   This is where it gets hairy because most of the time this means that nobody is happy.    The receivers probably don't appreciate the thoughtfulness behind the gift and the time the person spent trying to pick it out and the giver is probably under the wrong impression that this gift doesn't actually suck.  
The other thing behind the non-registry gift is that it's often something huge like a framed painting or a coffee table and the newlyweds probably don't live in a 4000 square foot house out in Westport.
So in this case the thoughtful gift is actually NOT thoughtful because you have to think how a grand-piano or refridgerator will actually literally fit into somebody's home, let alone the fact that you are trying to see how it will fit in with the rest of the furniture of somebody's home.

Now personally I am a bit divided on this issue pinning my sappiness against my realistic self.  I appreciate the thought behind the gift because 3 years after my own wedding I don't remember what anybody gave me unless it was a blender or an ice-cream maker.   But the problem is that the there is a reason I remember these gifts and it is because quite honestly I didn't want them then and still don't want them now.

But then again when you give it to a couple making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year is really feels like auto-gratuity.   I know that the thought is that you are trying to help them offset the cost of their wedding but honestly why should anybody's guest feel obligated to help pay for your wedding as it wasn't their decision to throw such an extravagant party.

So in closing:  give money.. although it is not real thoughtful you know that nobody is ever going to bitch about it (unless you give them less money than they expect) it's the safe gift and you just have to hope they use it for something worthwhile.