I love officiating weddings. This year, I had the blessing of officiating four weddings, the most in one year for me since pandemic. One was outdoors and hot, one was outdoors and cold, one was indoors because of rain but with open-air wall-sized doors pulled open, and one was outdoors and a remarriage and the temperature was just right. All of them were wonderful and left all in attendance with good stories to tell. If you’d like to book me to officiate your wedding, please let me know.
One of my favorite parts of a wedding is when I ask all in attendance if they will do everything they can to support this couple in their marriage and get everyone to shout, “WE DO!” The wedding is “the big day,” but the important thing is the marriage, or “all the days to come.” That’s when couples most need your support. Around three years ago, I wrote a blog post that somehow got popular in people’s search results called Five Practical Gift Ideas for Your Engaged or Newlywed Friends. It’s been a long time, so I thought I’d give you an update after experiencing weddings during pandemic and today.
If you want to give your friends who just got engaged or who are just newlyweds something practical, sensible, and reasonably priced, here are five new ideas for you:
Five Practical Gift Ideas for Engaged or Newlywed Couples
- Every couple needs a good calendar. I know I wrote about this last time, but can I be clear on this? When I sit down with couples getting ready for their marriage, the number one issue they need to work on consistently is their communication and it almost always relates back to the schedule. It’s not about controlling who goes where and when and with who. It’s about helping each other know the big picture, cutting down on surprises, and planning ahead to stay organized together. Marriage is about togetherness, isn’t it? This 3-Month Move-a-Page Calendar looks interesting. If your friends don’t have a calendar, look, just get ’em one. I don’t care if they use Google Calendar (we do) or a simple wall calendar (we do that, too), or this 3-month calendar, just be sure to 1. get one and 2. use it!
2. A good whiteboard goes a long way. The other thing I hear from young couples is they have a tough time with meal prep, menu planning, and grocery shopping. They have best intentions but when work has weird hours or everyone’s tired, it’s hard to make a plan let alone execute it. This menu planning board can give some semblance of a trajectory to shoot for as a team. Life has enough unknowns without the addition of lacking a game plan for your next meal. Again, this is all about communication. So, if you don’t want to blow your budget on take-out, if you want a date night you can commit to, if you want to have the joy of cooking together, plan it out.
3. Plan ahead for how you plan ahead a.k.a. know what’s in your deep freezer. For years, we used a deep freeze for a ton of items but we rarely touched them because we forgot about them. It still happens, but not like it used to, because we keep track of it better now. We use a small, plain white board to keep track of what’s in the deep freeze. This goes with the other whiteboard idea, just do simple steps for communication and it’s amazing how things get better. Want to take your white boards to the next level and get them into online? Get a set of Rocketbook Beacons and attach them to the whiteboard and let you put things in the cloud.
4. Pay for those preserved memories. Wedding photos are expensive but that’s okay because the best of the best are worth every penny! While it’s likely not worth you making a dent in that cost, you can help with the memories Many wedding photographers offer services like printing but if they don’t, offer to pick up the tab for a memory book. Shutterfly has amazing memory books that are themed for every occasion, including weddings, honeymoons, and just plain couple life. I was recently at an Eagle Scout ceremony and I was impressed by a Shutterfly memory book of that Scout and his Troop’s years together. Don’t let your friends keep their memories in the hard drive or, worse yet, on their phone. Give them the gift of a tangible memory book they can hold and enjoy together.
5. Journaling helps everything. Encourage it. I know it’s accidentally trendy to have a shelf filled with journal notebooks with cool covers loaded with empty pages and plenty of good intentions, but hear me out. Maybe it’s worth actually writing in them, yes? And, hear me out again, if you stop maybe forgive yourself and start again? Call it a journal, call it a diary, call it healthy because it is. There’s evidence that journaling, particularly about gratitude, is good for you. Imagine what a couple can do if they end their day with a journal entry about what they’re grateful for together. There’s a journal with an inspirational cover for everybody out there, so pick the one that’s good for them and here’s hoping they use it.
Your engaged or newlywed friends will have lots of sentimental gifts along the way, plus plenty of gift cards and all of that find China on their registry (which, I dunno, do we need all of that?). These gifts and others like them are practical and help them do better on a daily basis. Remember how you make a promise at their wedding to do what you can to support them? You could do worse than supporting them with gifts like these. Good luck, and thanks for reading.
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