Kiwi Kids Books

In the weekend I was fortunate enough to go to my brother’s engagement party. He is getting married early next year (unless they change the date for a record fifth time) and he and his fiancé decided to have an engagement party. Prior to venting my frustration, I would like to let it known that I am a man of celebration. I believe cultures thrive on celebrating success and milestones. However, I struggle with the concept of an engagement party.

If we are honest, and I will be, an engagement party is a twofold event. For the bride and groom to be, it is a giant present gathering exercise. For the prospective guests it is nothing more than a chance to stake their claim for a spot on the elusive wedding invite list.

Lets analyse the engagement party from the perspective of the engaged couple. They had been seeing each other for a while and then they announced to the world that they are to be married. The man has financially burdened himself in the form of an engagement ring and the woman has done little at this stage. Then for some silly reason they feel the need to organize a party to celebrate the fact they are now engaged. In no other area of our society do we have a party to announce something that will happen in the future. We don’t have a pre-birthday party and certainly no pre-21st. So really the engagement party is only organised so the engaged couple can get more gifts. What makes the situation worse is that the same people who will go to the wedding are usually at the engagement party. They are effectively double dipping against their own family and friends.

That is why at my brothers engagement party I made a silent personal stand. No present was bought from me or my family. Sadly, few people are as strong willed or as ethically pure as me, so as the night progressed the gift table morphed into a hill, then a mountain and by midnight it was probably visible from the moon. My brother was well pleased, as he should be. He had conned his friends and family into a pre event celebration and then fleeced them for wildly expensive gifts.
I did do one thing however. Late when few people were awake I went and quietly picked one of the present I thought looked good. I then removed the card and inserted my own. I will be interested to see what present I gave my brother and his fiancé. I suppose when the thank you notes are mailed out in the next few weeks I will find out just how generous I was.

While this dishonest move was a master stroke on my part it will have a huge effect on one sad soul at the party. We have looked at how the engagement party is a revenue gathering exercise for the engaged couple. On the other side of the equation this event is a selection process for those wanting to attend the upcoming wedding. Have you ever wondered why nobody ever hands out a wedding invite prior to an engagement party? The reason is because the value of your present at the engagement party has direct bearing on whether you will be invited to the wedding. Give a good engagement present and a place on the highly anticipated wedding invite list is yours. Conversely, a dud engagement present can mean suddenly the wedding is only ‘very small’ and just ‘for close family’.
I just hope the person whose gift I stole is a really close family member, otherwise turning up without a gift almost guarantees them not to get a wedding invite.

This ‘ranking of gifts’ effectively means people go out of their way to get the best present possible for the engagement party. Over recent years this means the quality of the gift has risen exponentially. No longer is it satisfactory to get 4 pink towels and smelling soap from Briscoes. Nowadays the appropriate gifts are designer tableware or high end European kitchen appliances.

While I may have opened your eyes to the hidden world of an engagement party it is certainly no easy ride for the engaged couple. You would think looking at the gift table that all of their Christmas’ have come at once. But it is a well known fact that having an engagement party actually makes the next step in the wedding process much harder.
We all know the next step is finalizing the wedding list. But now new information is available, in the form of their engagement present, and the job is much more difficult. Long lost uncles and distant relatives who never had a chance of being on the wedding list are suddenly ‘in with a show’ and close cousins whose engagement present was less than satisfactory are suddenly looked at through a different lens. Oh I can just see the stress levels rising now!!!!!

So I hope you know see how destructive an engagement party can be. What starts out as a great idea actually turns into a disaster waiting to happen. So next time you are invited to an engagement party take a personal stand like I did and don’t buy a present. On the other hand if you are planning on arranging one, don’t. Weddings are stressful enough without deciding to organise another social gathering. While the lure of the presents is great underneath lurks a giant waiting to pounce.