Over the years our family has gotten a reputation as, well, ‘picky, ‘ to put not too fine a point on the matter. We have to admit, my sister and I, that we do like to put forth a good deal of effort finding the ideal gift for any situation.
You see, our youngest nephew and his longtime girlfriend decided they wanted to get married after they’d finished our local community college. Both of them had been accepted at a four-year school in another state, where they want to finish their bachelor’s degrees, and they simply didn’t want to stay apart any longer.
Thrilled as we were at this news, we also were panicked. The happy couple was keeping their arrangements simple and casual, so there was less pre-wedding stress than might be expected. But my sister and I agonized for weeks over what would be the perfect wedding gift.
Given their situation, we found ourselves faced with a wedding dilemma: We simply couldn’t decide on an appropriate wedding gift.
The groom-to-be’s father set everyone laughing at a family dinner when he suggested we pool our resources to buy his son an Epiphone electric guitar. His wife, the mother of the groom, told her husband he’d had too much to drink; the boy asked for that guitar when he was 16 and in love with the lead singer in a rock band. The rest of the family chuckled at the notion. We didn’t see our level-headed nephew still pining for a guitar.
We wracked our brains for weeks trying to figure it out. At one point my sister, the mother of the groom-to-be, insisted the bridal couple could use a Delonghi oven. She said she’d heard them talking about it. A few days later she called to say she’d been wrong; he future daughter-in-law, a budding caterer, had been discussing various kinds of ovens with a friend, not expressing a desire for one.
There were days when we were truly at wit’s end. We thought about towels; too generic. We thought about traditional formal gifts like a glass wedding bowl; not useful for a young married couple still in college. We thought about other linens; practical to be sure, but somehow not romantic enough. We even considered getting them a Cuisinart food processor, until we realized that with all their classes and jobs to boot, it was highly unlikely they’d have time, for the present anyway, to concoct any recipes involving a food processor.
Finally we were days away from the wedding when an idea presented itself: a well-stocked gift card to a store of their choice ought to do the trick in a new location. Why we didn’t think of it sooner I’ll never know, but it solved our wedding gift dilemma in no time. The newlyweds were thrilled.
