No present pact

charlotteamy1984

Hi, hope I'm posting this in the right place.

As we are getting married next year and need to save up as much as possible for that, OH and I would like to suggest to our family/friends a 'No Present Pact'. I've seen that you can send an email via the MSE site, but was thinking we'd rather send our own message. I just wondered whether anyone else has done this, and whether anyone had an ideas for poems etc for a fun and lighthearted way to word it?

:rudolf::xmassmile

themull1

What if people had already bought you a present? its maybe a bit late in the day to suggest that? But if i did send an eamil all i would say is that i'm getting married, and i'm not doing christmas presents this year. Although i would hate getting that by email. maybe just phone people instead?

cazpumpkin

I think the email is a better idea and would send it with everyone visible in the address field so that people can see its a group email,

you keep emotional distance with an email , you keep it casual like its no big deal , you show that its your decision and wont be swayed and by addressing everyone as Hi All followed by blah blah blah nobody can take personal offence

phone calls have a habit of going pear shaped.

I would keep it simple and say

Hi All

Just an email to say that we are both ( X and Y) saving up for (Z) and wont be celebrating the festive season with extended gift giving this season.

We will be making a small donation instead to X charity and would like to take this opportunity to send you our love and best wishes in advance of the holiday season .

We would prefer not to receive gifts this season as we will not be budgeting for gifting ourselves. We do hope this message has not arrived too late and that people can make an exception for us this year as we concentrate on our main commitments.

Bella73

Unless you normally buy for hundreds of people I personally feel a phone call is more polite. An email smacks of can't even be bothered to discuss it with you to people you would normally buy for. Plus if it's a general email to all and sundry close people may think you didn't mean them so to speak.

We stopped exchanging gifts a couple of years ago and just told people as we saw them or I phoned for a chat and then told them.

A couple of people sort of said they would still get us something so I just reiterated that if they really wanted to they obviously could as their choice but that we would just be sending cards and we stuck to it even when we received the odd gift and just thanked people. The following year they stuck to it too which was a lot easier.

charlotteamy1984

Thanks for the thoughts so far.

I'm quite confident people won't mind and pretty sure they haven't been buying presents already. We've spoken a lot about our financial situation and both mums have already told us not to buy for them. We'll speak to people in person anyway, I was thinking though that an email or poem might help to break the ice and make it really clear to those that we'd normally buy for that that is what we're doing this year.

Thanks cazpumpkin for the idea for wording of an email, gives me some good ideas of how we might word it :-)