Over at Caramel (Learner at Love), CARAMEL has started a new prompt. I’d like to see her prompt do well, and I had some time today to write a post, so here we go…
The prompts are called the Caramel Crunch and so far are centered around a moral question. For your convenience I shall repeat her question.
You receive an invitation to the wedding of a friend. The reception will be at an expensive venue. You realize that they will be expecting guests to buy a gift from their wedding list. When you look at the gifts, they are all well beyond your budget.
Okay, another straightforward one.
Caramel mentions money twice in just a couple of lines, so I’m guessing that’s an issue. I always believed that if I couldn’t go into a restaurant and order the most expensive thing on the menu, then I should probably not go to the restaurant at all.
So I’d say thanks but no thanks, and duck out of the invitation. There’s going to be lots of other guests there, so nobody is particularly going to miss my presence.
It’s funny. As a singleton, I always tended to back out of weddings and engagement parties, they just made me uncomfortable.
Now that I’m married myself, I feel no such discomfort, but by the same token I’m under no illusion exactly how critical my appearance would be.
Miserable Old Sod
Mister Bump 
A while ago I was surprised to receive a wedding invitation from someone I thought as of an acquaintance. I happened to have already booked my flights for a trip abroad, so I could not attend the wedding anyway. However, I must admit that I was relieved that was the case.
I remember in the past how much she has complained about gifts she has received from friends and her partner. They did not meet her expectations and she slated the gifts and pronounced judgement on those who gave the gifts. It made me really scared of her. That is perhaps why I was content with our connection being mere acquaintance.
I have worked part time since I was sixteen so that I could spend most of my time working as a volunteer. My family are heavily involved in working for charities so they also live on modest means. We love spending time together, but we don’t do gifts and commercialism. There are 200 of us – can you imagine the costs involved if we were worried about gifts!
So our time together involves talking, laughing, music, dance, games, cooking and eating and we enjoy the great outdoors together. Flashy gifts are not part of our culture at all.
None of my family have had wedding lists at their weddings. Family weddings are normally for around 300+ guests and are very much a big team effort. There are some village halls in Snowdonia they can use for free and we do everything ourselves. If some guests want to give a gift, it is appreciated, but there is never any expectation of such or pressure.
I moved down south and was shocked at the atmosphere at some of the weddings I attended. (Of course it’s not exclusively in the south, but that was the first time I noticed a different spirit than the one of my family and friends up north). The venues, the weddings lists, the “perfection” of weddings. I am sure not all are like that, but maybe because many of my friends in the south were from wealthy families, I just felt terrified every time I received an invite to a wedding.
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I thought I could have enhanced my post a little by talking about my own wedding, at which there were just the two witnesses required by law. I picked my mate and my wife picked hers. Even our families didn’t know until afterwards. Our “reception” was afternoon tea for the four of us in a five-star hotel in Bournemouth, followed by a meal which had been arranged anyway, where I surprised everyone there when I announced that we’d got married that day and that I’d be treating everyone to their meal. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, I got off lightly. I was fortunate that my wife wanted the same, but ultimately that was quite important just from the matter of compatibility anyway. It helps when you want the same things 🙂.
But I’m so dozy, I only thought on after my post already had views. D’uk, dickhead.
I agree that it is strange that somebody basically wanted to profit out of their wedding. Just as an observer, it seems strange, if I were the partner and found out, I’d be worried about their motives. But you’d kind-of hope to be aware of that trait before you got that far, wouldn’t you? How did her partner feel, was he fussed?
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I have two ideas in my head about a dream wedding. One is exactly as that. A very private wedding with only a handful of us. I just want to seal the deal with as little stress as possible and go on living the rest of loves together.
However, i have another dream wedding. It is outdoors and then we have a big table of food and all of my families and friends and we dance in the meadow together.
I know I don’t want a Disney Princess wedding. The decision is where on the scale of simple and stress free or the whole empire gathering together for a noisy wedding it will be,
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We talked very loosely about going to https://www.littlepalmisland.com/resort-photos/, down in the Florida Keys, but wife was 5 mths pregnant when we got married. She felt shit for the whole 9 months.
I think a lot of people want to be the centre of attention for the day, but that never really appealed to me, I’d sooner just blend in, just get on with things without making it a big deal. I never had parties for either my 18th or 21st for that reason.
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