The GEM Debate: Is This Just A (Basket) Case Of TWO Tacky? : Good Enough Mother

The GEM Debate:
Is This Just A (Basket) Case Of TWO Tacky?

I don’t know where to start with this one. Both sides did something that I consider a little tre tack-ay, but I gotta say when you are given a gift you don’t like you shut your trap and roll with it making the bride in this case all the way tack-ay.

Here’s what happened. Couple falls in love, couple invites friends and family to $97 a plate reception, couple gets crappy gift, couple gets pisssssed. Apparently Kathy Mason attended the wedding of a friend with a homemade gift basket in hand. According the article in The Daily Mail, there was a “mix of ‘fun’ treats including pasta, olive oil, croutons, biscuits, Marshmallow Fluff and Sour Patch Kids” given all wrapped in what I’m assuming is a pretty basket. After the wedding Mason got a text stating she could essentially take her gift and shove it. The new couple wanted the cash.

I’ve been there. You work hard at a wedding and you really get excited about those gifts. As you are picking out each set you wonder just how many of each you will get, which friends will bestow the lower-end items, and how cool it would really be to get the gift you’ve been eyeing since way before you ever had a fiance. I would say the most unique gift I got at my wedding was an egg poacher. I never used it, but I still have it…somewhere. We got four salad bowl sets – four! No, we didn’t register for any of them, but we kept the one we liked and regifted (before regifting) the others. That’s what good friends do. They choke down their disappointment because you know what? That person showed up, shopped and generally tried to make your day special.

Cash. Been here, too. We spent the cash we got on groceries and maybe on the honeymoon which was just a hotel stay in the neighboring city. However, as strapped as we clearly were, we didn’t go so far as to figure out a way to get the money back for that egg poacher. I think since it was 20 years ago (no, what?) that maybe some of the hiding behind technology rudeness may seem to have deterred me, but nope. It was good, old-fashioned manners that did that. There was just no freaking way I was going to tell people who thought enough of me to come celebrate my day and buy (or regift) me a gift that I wanted the cash instead. And while we are on it, who doesn’t want the cash instead? I mean really? And if that’s what the couple wanted I’ve seen people try to ask for that tactfully, but this couple didn’t so they should have respected the gift without comment or question.

Now, the gifter. I gotta say there’s a way to give a gift basket and no amount of fancy Sour Patch Kids and Marshmallow Fluff is going to make this a good gift. If it is your best friend and somehow they conveyed they wanted this on their wedding, sure. As some sort of joke with an envelope (with a small token) tucked inside? Go ahead. But it wasn’t a gift I would think grown people would give at such an event. Gifts at a wedding are to send the couple off prepared for marriage. This gift basket doesn’t do that. So I do lay a little blame on Mason, too.

What about you? What would you have done if someone gave you marshmallow cream as a wedding gift? Would you send a text asking for a receipt or just (literally) suck it up? Are people just a little greedy these days and is this part of the entitlement of the young I’ve been hearing about? Let us know!