Weddings, and
everything around them.

A wedding generates more gift-buying than any other occasion and almost all of it is directed at a list the couple wrote themselves. That is efficient and it leaves the interesting problems untouched.

The interesting problems are these. What to give a couple who have lived together for six years and own everything. What to do at a reception where two families who have never met are supposed to talk to each other for five hours. What to put on the tables that guests will not leave behind. What to give five groomsmen that is not the fourth engraved hip flask they have received. And how to propose to somebody who would hate a public gesture.

The thread running through the answers is that a wedding is about people being in a room together, and the things that work are the things that help with that. A gift that captures the group, an activity that gives strangers something to talk about, a favour that gets opened at the table rather than carried home. Anything decorative is competing with a day that already has more decoration than it needs.

One practical note that applies across all of it: use ordinary photographs rather than the professional ones. Wedding photographs show people performing, in clothes they do not normally wear, and anything made from them produces characters who look like they are at a wedding rather than like two people.

Where to start