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Brittany L. Bergman

Savoring motherhood, building marriage, and living simply

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8 Tips for Creating a Simple Wedding Registry // Part 1 of 2

May 4 Leave a Comment

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been overwhelmed by Bed Bath & Beyond. Yep, me too. This store is like a warehouse with it’s triple-vaulted ceilings and products stacked and stocked all the way to the top. There are 17 choices of can openers, 40 different garbage cans, and endless patterns of dishes, china, and silverware.

Now, I do love this store. It has everything you could ever need. (I especially love the one near our apartment, because it has a beauty/bath section and a mini World Market right inside!) And those 20% off coupons that come in the mail every single week? I’m in love. But trying to navigate this—or any—store when creating a wedding registry can be a frazzling experience.

If you’re a minimalist, if you like to live simply, or if you’re just plain overwhelmed by the wedding registry process, here are a few of my favorite tips for creating a simple registry. Most of these tips will work well if you’re trying to build up the basics of your home. If you happen to be coming into marriage with many household items already, consider what you want to upgrade or skip to numbers 7 and 8.

Overwhelmed by the wedding registry process? Here are 8 tips to help you navigate the store and create a registry that will be just right for your new life.

1. Register for what you’ll need in the first year, not what you’ll need for the next 20 or 30 years. Here’s the thing: you’re not going to get everything you registered for. You’re better off registering for less by considering what you’ll need this year rather than registering for everything you might need someday. Because as we know with decluttering, one of the biggest ways to accumulate and keep on hoarding is to say “I might need this someday.” Someday doesn’t always look the way we think it will. And if you still want whatever the item is in 10 or 15 years, your tastes will likely have changed and you can get something you really love.

2. Consider the size of the place where you’ll be living. Are you going to be living in a studio apartment? A two-bedroom townhouse? With your in-laws? You don’t want to have to rent a storage unit to hold all the wedding gifts. This kind of goes with number one—register for your immediate needs.

3. Register for your actual lifestyle, not the one you wish you had. Who doesn’t love the idea of china, balloon-bottomed red wine glasses, stemware for fancy cocktails, linen napkins, and chargers? The idea of having a perfectly set table is fun to think about. But I rarely (actually, never) host dinner parties. My friends and I are pizza-on-paper-plates and beer-out-of-bottles people while we sit outside by a fire. And I like it that way. We didn’t want to register for the things that just don’t fit the way we like to live and entertain.

4. Take stock of what you already have, and then register for items that fill in the holes or that replace things that are worth upgrading. We needed to register for dishes and silverware because neither of us had any. My pots and pans were busted up and old, so we registered for a few quality cast iron pieces. Dan had some really classy Chicago Bears and Bulls drinking glasses from college. The day we went to register, he pulled them out and said, “Look at these! We don’t even need to register for a set of glasses!” Um, these were worth upgrading. Not necessary . . . but worth it.

5. Resist the cutesy things. Oh my word, there are so many cute and tiny little appetizer trays and servers and glasses, and I wanted them all! But do you know when the last time was that I needed little tasting spoons to serve tiny quiches? Never.

6. Register for limited decor items. Caveat: Ignore this if you pretty much already have the basics and you already live where you’re going to live after the wedding as well. When we registered, we had no idea where we’d be living or what we wanted our home to look like. We registered for just a few picture frames and a couple lamps that we knew would work with the bedding I already had.

7. Decide what can be low-end, mid-range, and high-end. You definitely want to register for things that will last, and a wedding registry is a great opportunity to build up quality pieces when you’re not the one paying for the quality. On the other hand, the more expensive each item is, the less you’ll get from your registry. Consider which things need to be high-end and which don’t. We registered for pretty much mid-range everything but made sure each item had good reviews and was made of solid materials. For example, we picked out all stainless-steel cooking utensils from BB&B and some durable, functional dishes from Crate & Barrel. The one high-end item we registered for was a Kitchen-Aid mixer, and even so, we chose a mid-range model rather than an artisan-style mixer.

8. Consider registering for donations or experiences. If you already have much of what you need, or if you want to go seriously minimalist, consider a non-traditional registry. The I Do Foundation allows you to create a charitable registry, and So Kind Registry has a whole host of options to choose from—you can register for gifts of time (for example, people can sign up to help you move), experiences, handmade gifts, and charitable donations. You can even request day-of-wedding helpers—a creative way to minimize wedding costs and stuff!

Married or engaged friends: How did you approach the registering process? What strategies worked best for you? What advice would you share with future brides?

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Filed Under: Marriage, Simple Living & Minimalism Tagged With: budgeting, experiences, home, minimalism, money, shopping, simple living, spending, wedding, wedding registry

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brittanylbergman

Brittany L. Bergman
✔️ Kamala shirt ✔️ Kamala pearls ✔️ Ka ✔️ Kamala shirt
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✔️ Kamala mug 
✔️ Kamala curls

It’s a great day to witness the shattering of a glass ceiling, to embrace empathy and decency, and to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

The work is only just beginning, but today, we celebrate. Congratulations, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris! 👏🏼🎉💙
What a beautiful, exhausting, festive, heartbreaki What a beautiful, exhausting, festive, heartbreaking, cozy, chaotic-but-strangely-quiet Christmas we had. ✨🎄✨

That’s a wrap for me on 2020—I’ll be off social media until sometime in January. May you be filled with peace and hope as we close this year but still wait for the close of this chapter in our history. 💜
I have faced Christmases full of grief and loss; d I have faced Christmases full of grief and loss; depression and rage; exhaustion and loneliness. But I can honestly say this is the weariest Christmas I can remember. I say that not to shine a spotlight on me, but to say that I have a feeling this might be your experience too. I’m with you.
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And so the words to my favorite Christmas hymn hit me different this year. They resonate in a place much deeper, more tender and true than ever before. I rejoice in the giggles of my meltdown-prone child. I rejoice in stolen moments alone in the dark, the room lit only by the glow of the Christmas tree. I rejoice in every video and every social media post I see of a frontline worker receiving the COVID vaccine, our ticket out of this nightmare. I rejoice in the vision that next Christmas might look more familiar than this one does. I rejoice in the hope of Christ, whose universal, creative, motherly love holds the whole universe together.
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On this Christmas Eve, I’ll leave you with this quote from Howard Thurman. I hope these words bring a slant of light to your day.
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“The symbol of Christmas—what is it? It is the rainbow arched over the roof of the sky when the clouds are heavy with foreboding. It is the cry of life in the newborn babe when, forced from its mother’s nest, it claims its right to live. It is the brooding Presence of the Eternal Spirit making crooked paths straight, rough places smooth, tired hearts refreshed, dead hopes stir with newness of life. It is the promise of tomorrow at the close of every day, the movement of life in defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than hate, that right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil.”
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Whatever and however you celebrate at this time of year, I’m sending you all my love and peace. 💫
I found my Christmas spirit this weekend, just in I found my Christmas spirit this weekend, just in the nick of time.

I baked cookies with Selah without getting frustrated (first time ever?), took the kids on drive to see Christmas lights, and wrapped a bunch of gifts.

But here’s what I think did the trick, and please do steal this idea (because I stole it from someone else but have no idea who): Magical Movie Night™️.

On Saturday night, I stealthily placed a golden ticket under Selah’s pillow (which I printed from the internets and colored quickly with a yellow marker; good enough is good enough for Magical Movie Night!). We put Eamon to bed and got Selah ready for bed too, going through all the normal motions of brushing teeth, putting on pajamas, picking out a book. When we climbed into bed, I told her to look under her pillow.

She was confused when she found the ticket, and I told her it was for a Christmas movie night. “When?” she asked. “Right now!” I said. “What do you mean ‘right now’?” When it dawned on her that she was going to stay up past her bedtime to have a special movie night with Mommy and Daddy (sans Eamon), she lost her mind with excitement.

Bonus: Gramma was waiting downstairs with a bag of popcorn and Swedish Fish!

We snuggled under blankets, turned on Elf, and laughed our festive butts off. (This was her first time watching Elf, and it felt like the dawning of a new era. It’s such a big kid movie! And she loved it! Hold me. 😭)

Deck the halls, bring on Christmas, fill my mug with holly jolly goodness. 

I also acknowledge this has been a crappy year in so many ways, and I know many of you are not going to be able to access Christmas cheer this year. That’s okay. The real spirit of Christmas is light breaking through the dark, love making a way, and the beauty that can’t help seeping through the dirty, messy, horribly human moments of our lives. So you’re covered.

(And if you want to fake it ’til you make it, give Magical Movie Night a try. It’s the actual easiest.)
In which I couldn’t come up with a clever captio In which I couldn’t come up with a clever caption. There are signs of life but my brain is dead. 💀
“This is what I find most mystifying about Adven “This is what I find most mystifying about Advent: the period of waiting ultimately ends in great joy, but we can’t get to that great joy without intense, active, unbearable pain. In Advent we sense the mingling of anticipation and anxiety, excitement and disappointment, joy and pain, hope and fear.
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“On this side of history, we have the luxury of waiting with great hope, great joy, and great expectation. We know Jesus will be born, we know he will save us and redeem us, we know he will die and rise again, and we know he will set all things right one day.
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“But before Christ came, Advent was dark. It was lonely and unknown, as the Israelites waited in faith to hear from God, and all they got was… nothing. Silence.
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“Isn’t this more characteristic of the waiting we usually do? The waiting seasons of our lives are less often marked by joy and hope and more often marked by pain and fear. They are not often cozy or comforting but difficult and dark and even laborious.
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“We wait as a pregnant mother waits for her child to be born—there’s a vision of the joy to come, to be sure, but in the throes of gut-wrenching labor pains, we think we might actually die before we see that joy fulfilled. After a long season of pregnancy, when the fullness of time has arrived, the advent of labor ushers in the real period of waiting—and it is active and painful and raw.”
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// From “In the Fullness of Time,” a new blog post on @first15. There’s a link in my bio to the whole piece, with thoughts on pregnancy, Advent, and waiting well in an exceptionally hard year. 💜 Thank you so much to @first15 for publishing this post!
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Brittany L Bergman is a for-profit blog. Any company that I collaborate with is chosen by me and fits the theme and readership of my blog. At times, posts may contain affiliate links or sponsored content, which is never at any charge to you.

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