What's in a gift, really?

If there is something that has almost fallen out of people’s favour, it is the practice of giving gifts at weddings. It is fast becoming a thing of the past. For, nearly all the wedding cards one receives these days contain a plea against them, as if accepting gifts from invitees is deemed demeaning by the invitors.

The period between November and May is largely rain-free and that’s reason enough for weddings to crowd these months. My wife and I occasionally get invitations from friends and relations soliciting our ‘esteemed presence without presents’.

And unlike in the past we don’t scratch our heads upon receiving an invitation over the questions: what gift should we buy? Will cash do? And so on. Not before some deliberation that we could arrive at a decision. Such situations have ceased to plague us for good. For, the climate has now changed. When we receive them, our eyes move right off to the bottom of the invitation cards to know what they say about gifts, overlooking for a moment other vital details about the wedding. And one usually reads:

‘No gifts or bouquets, please. Presents in your presence only.’ Or, ‘Your heartfelt blessings are our most cherished gifts’. Such pleas have become a common refrain these days. There is a widely shared enthusiasm for this trend.

As a young boy, I had attended several weddings in my village along with elders in the family and had not seen guests carrying gifts. Villagers were strangers to wedding gifts in those days, while city dwellers weren’t so.

People living in cities now, in the ‘no gift’ era that is, find it a bit embarrassing to tuck in a sumptuous lunch or dinner at a wedding without giving a gift, at least a bouquet, to the couple. So they carry money in an ornamental gift envelope and try to present it at the wedding, only to be turned down courteously.

In those days, when invitees thought giving gifts was unbecoming and hosts considered accepting them as a matter of course, forgetting to hand over them was not unusual, especially when you attended a wedding alone.

Only after you found yourself home you became aware of the oversight. Not everybody had this practice,  but members of a certain community in Mumbai did. Once I was amused to hear them announce at a wedding the names of gift givers and amounts received from them. So, if a guest did not want to be caught for being close-fisted, the money given had to be appreciable.

Back then, it wasn’t unusual that some skinflints gave empty envelopes to the couple. Some misers put a couple of scrap papers in the envelope! And such penny pinchers always made sure that they left the venue post-haste. And neither the envelopes nor their contents carried any telltale signs that would give them away.