More articles about our registry and wedding

I just did a Google and found some more articles about our Wedding registry that I wasn't aware of. We continue to find the interest amusing as we didn't think that asking for charitable donations as wedding presents was particularly unusual and really is one of the least strange things about our lives! Here a good piece in the Rocky Mountain News (Colarado paper) "Some save a piece of the wedding cake for the needy". Here's the press release that The Big Day (who managed our registry) sent out about us, I should note that the figures given in it for the number of beneficiaries are incorrect.

After all the embarrasing praise we've had for the rather unremarkable act of including some opinions for donations in our wedding registry, its rather refreshing to see this critical article by Lindor Reynolds in the Winnipeg Free Press "Save the world, fund a honeymoon" (here is the Google cache of it to avoid registering). "I've found the registry for do-gooders Jenny and Justin... [thence follows a list of both the charitable items on our registry and items related to our honeymoon]... Maybe it's me, but didn't it used to be traditional to have the honeymoon you could actually afford? And not to call it charity if it's just wrapped around a list of extravagant desires?" Ouch. In response to Linor, let me explain the thinking behind our registry. As people whose lives are split between many countries lot and who anyway don't like being cluttered with lots of possessions we asked most of our guests not to buy the standard wedding gifts. We would have been quite happy with peoples presence and/or prayers, but people naturally like to buy gifts at weddings, and so when we came across a website which enabled people to give cash instead of objects, but to do in a more personal way of contributing towards our honeymoon, this made sense. And as a time when a lot of money is being spent on our wedding and honeymoon, we didn't want to forget others, hence the inclusion of donations for medical aid for Iraqi children, funds to support a Palestinian friend's wedding and provision of livestock for subsistance farmers through Heifer International. So far we've had a total of 63 gifts to these three causes, totalling over $1200 and representing more than a quarter of the gifts we've recieved. We're grateful to everyone who's given. Interestingly the most (outrageously) generous gift we received came from an Iraqi.

I've just seen that Mil Rai has blogged about the wedding. He's an amazing Nepalese-English activist/writer who took a day out of his US speaking tour to attend the wedding. I didn't get more than 2 minutes to talk to him (this is the way with weddings) but I was so delighted he came and his reflections are interesting reading as always: The Resistance Wedding, Christian Song, Resistance Wedding Litany, The Other Cheek (his final post raises some important questions which I'll blog a response to in the future).