Wedding Gift Registries Are For Losers My pal Johnny F. has told me that he will someday soon post his excoriation of the very idea of wedding gift registries. And, as anyone who's read his posts will attest, it will no doubt be exceedingly well-written, logical, and call into light the relevant history of this common practice (I can't call it tradition or JF will yell at me). However, he has given me some preliminary data. One of the big problems he has with registries is that they embody the concept of "shopping off a menu", which seems to be one of the worst violations of the human spirit extant, and is unspeakably vulgar as well. A bigger flaw he will probably argue is that there is no tradition behind them, by which I understand means that the practice has not existed for 500+ years, or at least more than one generation.

I don't know if class will be part of his argument, as he was somewhat non-specific on that point, but I can see a couple of possible arguments there. If the wedding registries are not common among the wealthiest among us, he might argue that, among folks of that class, it is probably because, when confronted with an impending wedding, the wealthy would naturally allow their good taste and discretion select the appropriate gift, which of course requires no "menu", or any such pre-fab limitation in the selection of a gift. The more common folk, in turn, should emulate this virtue. If the practice is common among the wealthy, JF can of course use the well-documented observation of Theodore Dalrymple that ideas trickling down from the wealthy can have disastrous consequences on the underclass. In this case, on any class which practices wedding gift registries. Dalrymple writes of these ideas coming from intellectual elites, but the principle is similar.

So, the only option left to JF is to get this horrid practice stopped. Its very idea must be burned, the wrongness of it immolated in the purifying fire of good taste. Perhaps as a cautionary measure, Jerry Springer should be brought in to piss on its ashes (yes, in my world, ideas can be burned, and give off ashes as a product of combustion), whilst toothless, gawking, bovine yokels who've been mindlessly following the practice, like my wife and I, look on, the garish and meretricious spectacle regrettably necessary to drive the point home into our pig-like brains.

But of course, that may take some time to happen, and JF will soon have a reckoning with fate. For alas, he is about to be betrayed by his very own fiancé! After his wedding he will weep at his defeat, the sight of all of those non-redundant gifts sickening him and impairing his Spirit. Where are the eight toaster ovens to be returned? It is a small price to pay for good taste, breeding, and non-programmatic-template-shopping! Why, O why, did we get a subset of just what we asked for? Humans are surely sheep! Why no nutcrackers or cuckoo clocks, or martini sets so ugly that Satan Himself wouldn't use them at a cocktail party? No waffle-iron cozys or ugly picture frames!? We would, of course, never use these things, and they would take up space in our home for at least a generation, being too embarrassed to show them and too polite to throw them out or sell them, lest their giver give us a visit, but they are the product of real thought and selection! Surely he will shake his fist at the heavens and cry, "Fie on this blighted World! Hey, what's that? Ooh, a gift certificate from Pottery Barn. Hmm. This wasn't in the registry, yet it required no thought or taste to give. I must meditate on that.". And so, the sting is lessened to the point that JF can go on with his life. In 20 or so years he may actually forgive his wife.

Of course, there's the teensiest chance that I'm misrepresenting his position...  ¶ 19:11