Miss Manners: It’s come to this: Gift registries for 7-year-olds

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Gifts used to be something one put thought into. Unlike some of your readers, I don’t mind wedding registries. I treat them as guides, not demands, and don’t feel constrained to purchasing from the list. I find them especially useful for members of my husband’s family whom I don’t know well. (He’d forget to buy a gift, and I don’t mind.)

However, I just got a list of recommended gifts for a 7-year-old’s birthday – including a $200 electric scooter, which I was specifically urged to purchase.

I explained that I had already sent an age-appropriate building set. The silent disapproval was thunderous; I was even criticized for wrapping and mailing it myself.

Both the price point and the existence of a list in the first place seem outrageous, but the child’s mother and grandmother fully expect to get everything on the list. Are they delusional, or am I completely out of sync with the times?

I should also note that I never get acknowledgments, much less thanks, from this family. I’m much more enthusiastic about giving gifts to a friend’s teenage daughter, who always sends an actual handwritten thank-you note with photos of her enjoying the gift. So that practice isn’t completely dead.

Is a gift registry for a young child – or for any age – the new normal?

GENTLE READER: Those who declare this practice “the new normal” no doubt equate it with saving others the trouble of thinking. Miss Manners suspects it is merely a new twist on Pangloss: claiming that everything that is, is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.

Whether they are now commonplace or not, she does not approve of such registries – nor, for that matter, of wedding registries.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I can a lot of our garden produce, and have branched out to create other canned goods that I like to give as gifts. Over the years, I have given out many jars – several dozen, at least – and have only ever had one empty jar returned.

I was always taught that jars from gifts of homemade canned goods should be returned, but I feel like this is an “if you know, then you know” type of situation.

The thing is, prices for everything are going up, including for jars. I wonder if there is a way to ask for empty jars back without sounding tacky.

GENTLE READER: The tradition you cite did exist, but has fallen into disuse, likely in step with the decrease in home-canned goods generally.

Never one to discard tradition needlessly, Miss Manners will assist its reintroduction – so long as she is not required to do any canning herself – with a few ground rules:

Phrase your request as a reminder, rather than an instruction: “If you remember to return the jar, I will happily reuse it.” Do so at the time of gift-giving, not months later, when the jar may well be at the bottom of a landfill. And limit the requests to informal situations, and to people with whom you are close.

Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website www.missmanners.com.