So, I have a huge extended family, they all live near each other, but I moved away. To prevent my giant family from all having to travel, we are having our wedding in the area my family lives (and in a resort town so my fiancee's much smaller family can make the trip into a bit of a vacation).
Here's my concern - Every family wedding I've been to has a huge overflowing gift table (which is wonderful - my family is really very giving, and they love weddings). But since we have to travel from so far away we don't know how we will get big gifts back to our home. We are considering driving out to the wedding, but it is a 26 hour drive each way. We really want to fly there, and bring back what we can on the plane, shipping ourselves the rest.
Since people are ordering things online so often now, we are trying to find a polite way to ask that those who are buying things online ship them directly to us, instead of bringing them to the reception. Obviously we know that some gifts will inevitably be brought to the reception (especially older relatives like my grandmother who hates computers) and we don't want to appear ungrateful to our guests. We also don't want to make our guests pay extra to ship things they bought in a store - just figure if people are already paying shipping to get things from amazon, it'd be great if it went directly to our house.
I'm going to mention it to my immediate family at Christmas as casually as I can, but trying to think of a polite way to let others know without being tacky and inconsiderate. We are also making our primary registry on Amazon.com, with a second registry at Target for those who don't like online shopping, trying to limit the Target items to things that are smaller.
Is there a way to do this politely? Should we just resign ourselves to 52 hours in my fiancees truck? Anyone else run into this problem? Thanks