Congratulations to Amelie & Edward, winners of the 2015 SimpleRegistry Wedding Story Contest! The newlyweds have won a new iPad Mini!
We'd like to extend a huge thanks to everyone who shared their wonderful wedding registry stories. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we'll post more top story submissions.
In the meantime, read a few highlights from their winning entry below. You can also read the full story here.
"No more stuff!" Ed's muffled voice drifted up from the fathoms of a giant cardboard box labeled MISC. I sat on our couch with the laptop, reviewing a long spreadsheet filled with the names and addresses of our assorted loved ones. SimpleRegistry was just about to enter our lives.
We were engaged and had been living together in Amsterdam for a year. Our story began six years earlier, when we fell for each other (he ran into me trying to defend a goal, and we both fell down, and that joke never gets old) while playing ultimate Frisbee in Seattle. At the time, he lived in Chicago and I lived in Seattle. We started dating. Two long years later, I packed my belongings into my Hyundai Accent and drove east. I found a job when I got to Chicago.
Two years after I moved to the Windy City, Ed's job proposed that he move to the Amsterdam office, and Ed proposed to me. Both events had a nice ring to them. We whittled our lives down to six sturdy boxes and four pieces of checked luggage, and started a new adventure: living together.
Now Ed was sitting in a pile of cables, shaking his head as he tried to identify them and his reasons for paying to have them shipped across an ocean. I thought of our parents' basements, with their unsteady columns of boxes lining the walls, the material evidence of forty years of life together. I looked at Ed, intent on sending this one box to the recycling, and marveled again how I had gotten so lucky. For a couple whose dating history is as complicated as calculus, Ed and I live best when life is stripped to the essentials: Family and close friends, nature, home-cooked food, books. Our wedding would be home in Washington State, with people we loved. That was the kind of "stuff" we needed
"Done," I said. "No more stuff." I returned to the guest list. Then I had an "uh-oh" moment.
"What are we going to do about a gift registry? Can we just nicely ask people not to get us anything?"
Ed dropped a handful of electrical outlet converters, horrified. "We can't do that! People will want to give us things!"
"But didn't you just say, 'No more stuff'?" I accused.
He looked thoughtful. "What we need is... some kind of... SimpleRegistry."
These prophetic words led us to the internet, and our first search led us (you guessed it!) to SimpleRegistry. True as a cow, as the Dutch say. Three minutes later, our account was verified, and we began to brainstorm a list of Things That Are Preferably Not More Stuff.
Click here to continue reading Amelie & Edward's amazing wedding story.
To check out the amazing stories from last year's finalists, click here.