Being a Pastor, I get invited to a lot of weddings – occupational hazard or privilege depending on how you look at it! And about this time every year the invitations start coming in. And my wife and I start making the decisions. In addition to deciding whether we are going or not, the big question is – what do we give as a gift / how much are we going to spend? Then my wife and I go through a series of questions:
- For us, the first is, do we even know the couple? Many times we don’t – we just know the parents (barely) because we are the Pastor.
- Do we know one / both of them?
- How well do we know them?
- Did we go/give a gift to any of their siblings when they got married?
- Are the children invited?
- Where is the wedding?
Even with the questions, it’s always difficult for us to know how much to spend. Being a Pastor with three children, money is not just laying around waiting to be spent! We don’t want to be cheap, but with multiple weddings in a year, gifts, travel, etc., it can get expensive.
If we really know the couple, we try to get a personal gift. That makes it fun and the couple usually is delighted with the extra thought. We have given baskets with picnic goodies, or if they have hobbies sometimes hobby supplies (gardening tools, etc.), sometimes we give tools if they are a young couple and don’t have anything! If we don’t know the couple, then we may go to gift cards or something off of their list – usually toward the lower end. We try to keep the gifts in the $25 – $50 range.
So what do you do? I would love to know how you handle wedding gifts.
