Groomsmen Gifts

#KeyWest #sunset #seascape #nature #boat via dickster1961

I think I might have mentioned that election day happens to coincide with my wife's birthday and our anniversary.  Yes, we got married on her birthday.  It makes life easier for me as I only have to remember the one date and not two separate dates.  Just kidding.  If you follow some of my political rantings, then you can probably guess what I hope she gets as a gift that night.

Actually, if the truth were known, we have two anniversaries.  The first one is November 6th.  My wife and I took a vacation to Key West, and while we were down there, she decided that she was wanted to get married on her birthday in Key West.  We had been planning a church wedding for the spring which we had on May 2nd, albeit a much smaller ceremony than we originally had planned.  The November date is the one that we celebrate.

As I said, our church wedding ended up being much smaller than originally planned.  Originally, I had planned to have my two brothers serve as co-best men and have three ushers.  I still used my brothers as best men and only used one usher, my brother in law.  My wife only used her sister as maid of honor and had no other attendants.

 As is tradition, I needed to come up with gift for my groomsmen.  I really wanted to try to come up with some unique groomsmen gifts.  This was back in the days before everything was online and you could order whatever you wanted from an online site with a large selection.  Back then, there were very few choices of places where you could get those kinds of gifts.  Then, you were limited to whatever selection that the store was carrying.

Any gift that I bought, I wanted to be able to have personalized. I considered a wide variety of items to give the guys as gifts.  There was the ubiquitous hip flask.  I decided against it because at that time none of the guys were really into drinking liquor.  We weren't even into wine that much.  No, we were pretty much all beer drinkers.  So that is what I went with, but a typical beer mug/stein/glass wouldn't do.  I settled on a horned shape beer glass with a pewter plaque that was engraved with their initials.  Now, though, thanks to internet sites, there is so much more to choose from for gifts.

By the way, the photo in this post was taken on a sunset cruise in Key West during the vacation when we got married.