DEAR MISS MANNERS: Gifts used to be something one put thought into. Unlike some of your readers, I don’t mind wedding registries. I treat them as guides, not demands, and don’t feel constrained to purchasing from the list. I find them especially useful for members of my husband’s family whom I don’t know well. (He’d forget to buy a gift, and I don’t mind.)
However, I just got a list of recommended gifts for a 7-year-old’s birthday -- including a $200 electric scooter, which I was specifically urged to purchase.
I explained that I had already sent an age-appropriate building set. The silent disapproval was thunderous; I was even criticized for wrapping and mailing it myself.
Both the price point and the existence of a list in the first place seem outrageous, but the child’s mother and grandmother fully expect to get everything on the list. Are they delusional, or am I completely out of sync with the times?
I should also note that I never get acknowledgments, much less thanks, for gifts I send this family. I’m much more enthusiastic about giving gifts to a friend’s teenage daughter, who always sends an actual handwritten thank-you note with photos of her enjoying the gift. So that practice isn’t completely dead.
Is a gift registry for a young child -- or for any age -- the new normal?
GENTLE READER: Those who declare this practice “the new normal” no doubt equate it with saving others the trouble of thinking. Miss Manners suspects it is merely a new twist on Pangloss: claiming that everything that is, is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.
Whether they are now commonplace or not, she does not approve of such registries -- nor, for that matter, of wedding registries.
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(Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website, www.missmanners.com; to her email, dearmissmanners@gmail.com; or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.)
