Wedding Gift List

It was about this time last year, that we were gearing up for our own wedding, and I thought I would share with you what we did for our wedding gift list.

Wedding gift lists vary depending on your own circumstances, opinions, and culture. Some cultures tend not to buy tangible wedding presents, but instead pin money on the Bride and Groom at the end of the wedding reception. This is to set the Bride and Groom up for their married life together.

Some Bride and Grooms find they already have every toaster they could ever want in their soon to be marital home, they have an airing cupboard full of (mis)matching towels, and the Bride and Groom decide that they would prefer their wedding to have a charitable effect elsewhere in the world. For these couples the ethical wedding list is what they are looking for, as discussed in more detail by our NewlyWeds-UK columnist and blogger Katie from Ethical Weddings in her Ethical weddings blog.

If a Bride and Groom don't have a house full of silver frames, decanters and cutlery, or if the Bride and Groom set up house together a few years back and now need to upgrade or replace everything, but they still want to be ethical wedding consumers, then maybe consider an ethical wedding gift list with someone like EcoCentric as NewlyWeds-UK reader Niki did.

But failing all the ethical intentions, with your materialistic urges coming through, and the empty shelves at home crying out for some silver candlestick holders, then the choice comes down to holding and managing the wedding gift list yourself, or (the option we went for) letting someone else manage it for you.

We chose to use John Lewis and the John Lewis Wedding Gift List service as our wedding guests are fairly well spread around England and there should be a John Lewis store fairly near all of them. Of course they can always order from John Lewis Wedding List online.

We arranged to set up our wedding gift list at our local John Lewis at Bluewater in Kent. On locating the gift list centre within the store, we sat down with one of the gift list staff who went through the details of our wedding; names, dates etc and how the wedding gift list service works...

John Lewis give you a barcode scanner which you and your partner wander around the store with, scanning all products you would like to add to your wedding gift list. This can take a lot longer than you might think! We were expecting to spend a couple of hours at the most selecting items for the wedding gift list, but John Lewis made the point of reminding us of the store's closing times and to return the scanner back half an hour before! Well it turns out they were correct and it actually took us around 6 hours total to scan and log all the items we wanted on our wedding present list.

One really nice touch was that John Lewis gave us a voucher for their cafe so we could grab a cup of tea or coffee and a cake half way through scanning to give ourselves a refreshment break.

So we scanned and walked from aisle to aisle adding to our wedding gift list as we walked, stooped, and beeped.

Afterwards we were able to go through the wedding present list and add or remove items, or change the colour/size/model of the items we had selected. This was done either sitting in the gift list centre in the John Lewis store, or via the internet remotely.

All in all we were thrilled with the service we received from John Lewis and would recommend the John Lewis wedding gift list service to budding Brides and Grooms. They delivered our wedding gifts two weeks after the wedding, on a predetermined date, after we had returned from our honeymoon ensuring no wedding presents were left in our house while we were away.

For more information visit the John Lewis Gift List website