Wedding Invitations

Wedding Etiquette predicament ahead.

A couple of years ago, I attended a wedding that was a two-hour flight from my home.

Consulting the couple’s online wedding gift registry, ad knowing that the couple liked to entertain business guests at home, I selected a really nice serving set.

Then, as the date drew nearly imminent, I began to kick around an important logistical matter. Should I actually bring the set to the wedding reception, have it shipped to the nearby hotel where most of the wedding guests (including yours truly) were staying, or ship it to the newly minted husband and wife after the crazy weekend of the ceremonies?

I recoiled a bit at the first option. The set was rather heavy, cumbersome, and - given the glasses included- rather fragile. I once learned that “fragile” and “airline overhead compartment” don’t go together all that well. Neither, actually, do “fragile” and “checked baggage.”

Shipping to the hotel (about a mile’s drive from the church) would have been OK, but I still would have had to take the gift to the reception. That sounded like the solution, but there’s something else.

The Honeymoon. Did I really want to subject the new husband and wife to asking the wife’s sister- who lived in another city than they did- to store the dozens of wedding gifts that were sure to be given that wedding day? Where could she store them, and then get to her sister when she and her new husband returned from their honeymoon?

Although I opted for that latter course, there was a third option that I did not consider.

Leigh Zarelli at the Web site Gifts.com offers another option, one which I wished I was aware of at the time.

“Should you bring the gift with you on the wedding day? No. Better to send it, and give the couple (and you) one less thing to worry about,” the Associated Press today quotes Zarelli as saying.

But how long should you wait to send it?

“Wedding etiquette has it that guests have up to one year after the wedding to send a gift, but don’t let it hang over your head that long,” she adds. “Try to get the gift to them by the time they get back from their honeymoon, or soon after.”

(Associated Press, via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)