There have been a few stories this summer wedding season about stolen and missing wedding gifts. In the worst cases, wedding crashers or passersby simply steal the wedding gifts from the reception. In others, a wedding gift never arrives. As with a lot of wedding disasters, good planning can help to prevent this sort of thing.
You know in the movies when people crash a wedding and the bride thinks the crasher is a friend of the groom’s and the groom thinks he’s a friend of the bride’s? It really does happen. Large weddings can easily fall victim to this sort of thing so feel free to use this as one more excuse to keep your guest list on the smaller side. If you’re using a wedding coordinator point out anyone unfamiliar. If you aren’t using a coordinator, deputize a friend to run interference with anyone you don’t know. You may also want to ask a friend to serve as a gift attendant to make sure the gifts get moved to a safe location after the wedding. Greeting all of your guests personally is another good way to make sure no one unknown has slipped into the wedding.
The gifts would ideally be placed in a safe location, away from any doors, from the start. Make sure to speak to the coordinator for your wedding venue about possible locations for gifts.
Hopefully, you’ll have as few gifts as possible brought to the wedding. This eliminates lost gifts, gifts separated from cards, and stolen gifts. Creating a gift registry, and including that information on a wedding website will help encourage people to purchase gifts before the wedding and send them directly to your home. This also allows you to get a head start on writing those thank you notes.