You know who is probably not being showered with enough gifts and attention just for making the huge relationship decision she and her significant other made recently? The bride-to-be in your life. Hear me out.
Do not, do not, let the glimmer-glamour, everyone’s-special-right-now glow of the holiday season outshine your beautiful bride. She only has one wedding; that Joy to the World Bullshit happens every year. Restore her status posthaste by gifting her something that makes her feel premium, excessively bridal, frenzied even—something to remind her, and everyone you both know, that she is urgently, brilliantly, impeccably, sparklingly on her way to. Something. Big.
I—I mean she—she deserves it.
1. This Indispensable Planner to Keep Everything in One Place, Barneys, $75
The first adult wedding I attended (as in, I wasn’t the flower girl and it wasn’t 1993) was one between a coworker and friend at my first job out of college in NYC. She was in event planning at our company, so she was supremely organized and proactive when she started planning her own wedding, devoting to it an entire binder-notebook combo for all of her vendor contacts, site visit notes, quotes, ripped-out magazine pages, etc. Now, every time a friend gets engaged, I buy her a pretty notebook to help her start organizing her wedding plans.
This one from Smythson is luxurious, like mink, almost too pretty for this world, and includes all the right tabs (so she won’t have zillions of post-it tabs sticking out of it everywhere, looking like a half-plucked chicken). It has a leather cover so it’ll stand up to all the banging around in her tote bag it may encounter. I’m not sure how the tab “Going Away” differs from the tab “Honeymoon”—the former sounds quite morbid and as though the bride is being sentenced to 20 years of hard time, if you ask me—but otherwise, this is a perfect planner. When it’s all filled and the wedding’s passed, how lovely would it look on a shelf?
Budget-friendly option: This printable template is instantly downloadable, hole-punchable, pop-into-a-binder-able and highly personalizable.
2. A Calligraphy Class so She Can Do that Shit Herself, Laura Hooper Calligraphy, $225
It costs like, 20 oil trucks’ worth of virgin blood to hire someone to calligraph one’s entire wedding: Invites, menus, table settings, nice letter to bigot uncle explaining why he’s not invited, stupid signs that point which way is dinner and which way is dancing and which way is happily ever after, and so on. And your bride-friend is soooo much more enterprising than that. So give her the gift of
- Learning a sick new skill;
- something she can actually use to make her wedding all the more special; and
- an opportunity to watch her engagement ring sparkle from all sorts of new angles and hand-flicks.
You could even go with her to the class, so you two can spend more quality time together, aw! (But don’t get drunk beforehand for once, if you can stand that.) Laura Hooper hosts workshops all over the country, and the price includes all the supplies your bride will need (plus snacks!).
Budget-friendly option: This rubber stamp can be customized with her and her fiancé’s initials so they can monogram every last inch of their wedding, without having to pay his mom’s coworker’s hoity-toity graphic designer daughter.