Excerpted from
Forget the monogrammed flatware. How about a contribution to the mortgage?
By Julia Silverman, Associated Press Newswires
January 29, 2005

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - After 28 years, countless breakups and make-ups, and innumerable fashion emergencies, Cathy and Irving are finally tying the knot.

The big day is set for Feb. 5, and their friends are thrilled for them, with the exception of the band of 40-ish bridesmaids insisting that they'll each require approximately $11,500 worth of cosmetic surgery to look presentable in the wedding photos.

Like most modern couples, you can find their registry online. But Cathy and Irving have asked for no soup tureens, no silver-plated egg poachers, no his n' hers champagne flutes.

Instead, the two-dimensional couple -- featured in the popular "Cathy" comic strip drawn by Southern California artist Cathy Guisewite -- have registered for charitable donations to Pet Orphans of Southern California, a Los Angeles-area animal shelter, via a Portland-based Web site, www.thebigday.com .

The site is one of a growing number that cater to the less-than-traditional wedding couples, fictional and actual alike, who want to register for intangible gifts.

The trend toward online registries bloomed around the turn of the century, when even outlets like Home Depot and amazon.com entered the lucrative market. Suddenly, couples could register for a chainsaw, if they liked, or a DVD of HBO's hit "The Sopranos."

This second wave, though, does away with even such bricks-and-mortar-presents.

These days, couples are registering online for everything from honeymoons and charitable donations to down payments for a house or even good old cash.

It's a far cry from the days when brides and their mothers picked out a nice china pattern, some glassware and left it at that.

"People are getting married later in life," said Michael Cottam, one of the co-founders of thebigday.com, via which wedding guests can arrange to pay for the happy couple's day of snorkeling in Belize, or a kayaking expedition in Thailand. "They value experience more than material items."

Since its inception a few years ago, thebigday.com has grown to be one of the Internet's most popular honeymoon registry sites, alongside sites like www.thehoneymoon.com and www.honeyluna.com . The site's networked travel agents help couples design a trip, and then guests can chip in for the airfare, the hotel room or for an "experience," like tickets to a Broadway show.

The company charges a service fee for processing gifts, unless the couple books $2,000 worth of travel through the site.
For Guisewite, the Internet registry was a perfect solution to the letters she was getting from fans asking how they could send Cathy and Irving a gift.

She checks online every day to see how many donations have been made, -- so far, the total is more than $12,000 and counting -- and promises a thank-you-note and a signed wedding cartoon to everyone who does donate.

The Web site's name appears periodically in the strip, as in a recent panel in which one of those same 40-ish bridesmaids gleefully reminds Cathy that now she can cash in on all the wedding gifts she has bought over the years. The bride demurs, saying she and the groom have registered at thebigday.com instead.

"I am extremely sensitive to the fact that I am being paid to run my comic strip in this space, and I don't believe my strip should be a forum to promote my own causes," Guisewite said. "So I wanted to work it in gently enough so that people could both think it was a made-up name, or they could check it out to see that it really exists."

Guisewite also said that her characters, marrying in their 40s or thereabouts, have spent years acquiring gadgets and fads of all stripes.
"When someone like Cathy looks realistically at her life, the grand mature thing to do is offer friends and family a way to donate to a cause the couple believes in," she said.

That's part of why the number of couples signing up with sites like San Francisco-based www.justgive.org has doubled every month for the last two years, said Kendall Webb, that site's founder and executive director.

Her site lets couples sign up and choose any charity they'd like their guests to donate to. Justgive.org charges a $5 processing fee per donation and so far, Webb said, has raised over $100,000 for various charities.

"Couples these days cringe at materialism," she said. "Candy bowls, vases, trinkets -- people don't want the burden of having to display those gifts if the givers come over, but they don't want to throw things away."

Most couples, she said, tend to pick local charities, that do hopeful work -- less disaster relief, more animal rescue groups.

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On the Net:
www.thebigday.com
www.emilypost.com
www.suntrustmortgage.com
www.justgive.org