Hi belles! Our friend and former Southern Weddings intern Jessica Clinch is the newest gal to take you through her wedding process here on the blog! Jessica will be blogging for us once a month until her wedding next May. In case you missed her introductory post, be sure to check it out here! — Emily
With the holiday season of gift giving in full swing, Zack and I thought it would be fun to share a few tips and lessons we learned from creating our wedding registry! We were both so incredibly excited to register, because the items we are adding to our registry will be a part of what helps to make our house a home and our life together in marriage full of new adventures!
Our approach to creating our registry turned out to be quite fun for us. We knew we wanted to go to at least two stores to register in person, since we feel every couple should get to experience walking through aisles with a registry gun – it really is such a thrill! For our in-person stores, we chose Target and Bed Bath & Beyond. We also knew it would be smart to sign up for an online registry, Zola, where we could register for items from a variety of shops and keep everything together in one easy place. I had a little bit too much fun adding items to this list!
So, once we selected our places to register, we wanted to come up with a strategy for how to register. We came up with a few different groups of items and activities we wanted to register for, and kept those in mind during the process! Hopefully these will be helpful for any of y’all who are about to create your own wedding registries!
Activities and Monthly Subscriptions: Did you know that you can register for activities, subscriptions, and services in addition to physical items? This was so mind blowing to me! I think it is such a sweet and modern idea to register for activities to do together as newlyweds, monthly coffee or wine clubs to try, or a moving service for couples who are moving into a new home together after their wedding day!
Our favorite activities and monthly subscriptions: Both of us adore playing games, and we really want to increase our collection of board games for ourselves, and our future children! We registered for games like Scattergories, Monopoly, and Jenga. We also love cozy date nights at home watching television or a movie, and one of our favorite series is Friends. It would be so great to have the complete series collection on DVD! And, I’m all about supporting small businesses and trying new things, so the opportunity to have a subscription that features a hand-selected variety of artisan ingredients is something we would love to try.
Money Funds: Many wedding guests give gifts of cash or check, so why not allocate that money toward something either for your wedding day, your honeymoon, or your first year together as newlyweds? I love that Zola has a category of funds ranging from a house down payment fund to a charity fund, a wedding photography fund, and more. So thoughtful!
Our favorite money funds: I am really looking forward to our entire wedding day, but it will be so special to have our first moments together alone at the end of the night to soak everything in and really realize that we are husband and wife! Having a bottle of champagne to end the night on a celebratory note would be perfect! We also cannot wait to go on our honeymoon, and it would be really special to have our guests contribute to a honeymoon fund. On a similar note, we have registered for round trip airfare, which we’ll use for our honeymoon, but it would also be a fun fund to use toward travel in our first years together!
Practical Home Items: This might be an obvious category, but one that is definitely very important! While both of us have sets of plates and silverware, bakeware, and pots and pans, many of them are from when we were in college! This is the perfect time to register for sets and items that are great quality and will last through all of the holidays and dinner parties we plan to host throughout the upcoming years.
Our favorite practical home items: I love the idea of mixing and matching plate sets for a fun, modern look! These black and white lattice-patterned salad plates would look so darling atop these gold-rimmed dinner plates! I have always wanted a crock pot, so one is definitely on our list. And Zack cannot wait for the chance to cook meals on this great nonstick cookware.
Splurge Items: At first we were a bit hesitant to add any splurge items to our registry. However, we realized that some of our friends and family might not be able to make it to our wedding, and would really like to get us special gifts instead! Zola also made us more comfortable registering for these splurge pieces, because their platform gives guests the opportunity to contribute a certain amount of money toward an item as a group gift.
Our favorite splurge items: We both love wine, and dream of having a wine cellar or wine room in our house one day (a girl can dream, right?). Until that happens, we think it would be so cool to have a wine refrigerator! We also love a good cup of coffee on Sunday mornings, so a new Keurig would be wonderful. I have always loved the look of X bench ottomans, and this one would match perfectly in our living room!
Entertaining Pieces: I know that nothing “really” changes when you become a wife, but I envision newlywed life as the perfect time to begin hosting more dinner parties and weekend guests! It is absolutely something I want to begin soon, and am even more excited to one day have a house of our own where we can be the couple who hosts family holiday dinners.
Our favorite entertaining pieces: Growing up in an Italian family meant that dinners at my house had a lot of different platters of food to sample during the holidays! I love the idea of mixing and matching platters to showcase our tasty treats in a stylish way. My favorite style combination includes this white and gold metallic platter, this round marble serving tray, and this wooden antipasti plate. Zack has experience as a bartender, so creating craft cocktails for our guests would be really fun, especially when done in this sleek black and brushed gold shaker! And it would be so sweet to treat our guests to breakfast in bed on these darling wooden bed trays.
Friends, I’d love to hear: What pieces were your must-haves on your registry? Or, what do you wish you had thought to add to your registry?
Looking for even more inspiration? You can view everything we chose for our registries here: Zola, Target, and Bed Bath & Beyond.
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