Gifts

A few days ago (if not weeks ago), I looked through our cards again b/c someone mentioned that her check hadn't been cashed yet. And lo and behold, I DID have a brain fart the first time around and I saw that I had left 3 gifts with their cards. I have no idea why but it was good to retrieve these gifts! (And maybe one of these days we'll sit down and actually write thank you notes. :P) It was also nice to look through the cards again b/c when we were opening it, there were so many to go through and I was so busy tracking who gave what that I barely remembered any of the cards nor the sentiments expressed in them. But this time around I noticed some really nice ones with 3-D stuff like ribbons and pearls or cut-outs and pop-ups (I think a lot of them were from Target) and it almost makes me want to make wedding cards for ppl. I also noticed one person removed the seal from our invite and used that to close his envelope, like so:

I'm not sure how I feel about that (desecration! but it's recycling too....)

Anyway, this also made me think about gifts in general. For one thing, some gifts were really surprising (in both good and bad ways). Some ppl were really really generous (thanks!!) and I'll save my rant about the ppl who gave $25 or nothing at all, but WHY do ppl leave price tags on their gifts?! One gift was especially precious: a set of jewelry with the price tag on the bottom (an inflated price I'm sure b/c it reeks of a sale item) and written on the TOP of the box in thick purple marker (so that I can't possibly re-gift it!) is a note to just ME, like Dear doesn't deserve a gift at all, yet the card was addressed to the both of us, not that he could really use a pearl necklace or bracelet.

Well to be somewhat productive instead of ranting all the time, we are trying to figure out who gave us this (no card inside the unmarked bag):
Please let me know so that we can mercilessly mock you, ahem, I mean write a proper thank-you note. No, really, we appreciate this. It has grown on me and I think it's kinda kitschy cute. We could always use olive oil and balsamic vinegar, plus it is pretty good! So lemme know if this is you -- I really want to be able to write a real thank you!