Let's have trial separation for wedding gift rule
By Beth Teitell
Thursday, July 14, 2005

Should I ever be nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court, I know this on-the-record statement will come back to haunt me but I'm going to say it anyway: It's time to change the ``you have a year to buy a wedding present'' rule.

A year? I'm sorry, but no one's that busy.

With wedding season in full swing, I've run into guests in various stages of procrastination, some facing imminent deadlines from last summer, and I can tell you, they're very stressed.

Yesterday I was in a store talking with the owner, a lovely 26-year-old who's together enough to have her own thriving business, but not together enough to go to PotteryBarn.com, or wherever, and click her friend a present.

``I'm thinking of writing a check,'' she said, ``but that would look so pathetic. It's like, why did I wait so long if that's all I'm going to do?''

She seemed sweet so I didn't want to scare her, but putting off buying a gift, like delaying a visit to the dentist, only worsens the pain. Even if her friend's registry is still up, it's probably been picked clean. All that will be left are a single fork and a Tupperware celery keeper. And how bad will that look?

``The power seems great at first,'' another procrastinator told me, ``but then you abuse it. So even though you had all this time, at the end, you're still buying in panic mode.''

As in: Fed Ex-ing your friends a present so it arrives by close of business on the first anniversary. (Strangely, the question of what happens if you miss the one-year deadline has not been addressed by the etiquette experts.)

As for the happy couple, the one-year rule makes them say things about their friends that they don't mean. Such as: ``That @#$% had plenty of time to do her hair and nails before the wedding and drink our wine and eat poached salmon, but she's too busy to buy us a present?''

``What happens when you run into the person (who didn't give you a gift?)'' asked Phyllis Block, director of weddings at the World Trade Center Boston and Seaport Hotel.

And the hyper-tardies who finally pony up the remaining Lenox china off the registry aren't doing the happy couple any favors.

What, Block asked, are you supposed to do with three place settings? ``Do you start using them and hope you'll get the other nine sometime in the next 12 months? Do you buy some more yourself?''

Do you return them and use paper? (That's what I'd do.)

Meanwhile, if there's one benefit to taking the allotted time, it's this: Yes, the longer you wait the more expensive a gift you have to buy;then again, if the couple split, you're home free.