Kitchen aid mixer food for thought

I've certainly never given a wedding gift just to one half of the couple and that was one of my issues with the article. 

A shower gift might be more "to the bride" since at least in my experience showers are female affairs.  Although why I should have to suffer through an event for one of DH's relatives while he gets off scot free is a topic for a different thread and also the reason i have sworn off future shower attendance for life.

But a shower gift would be chosen off the same registry as the wedding gift, and I would assume most couples create the registry together, so to me giving either member of the couple any of those gifts is a gift to them both regardless of the occasion.  

For me, it isn't as much that I do "so much" baking as that things are so much easier and turn out better when I use the mixer.  I just don't have the arm strength or the patience for some things and Mixie is always happy to help.  Plus it's handy to be able to have Mixie working on the mixing while I can move on to another part of the recipe.

I also remember on the old board that having a Kitchen aid was kind of a status symbol thing and whether you used it or not, you simply HAD to have one.  I know there were other things that fell into that same sort of category, but I can't think of any others so maybe someone else can chime in here.  I've never been big on that "keeping up with the Jones' " lifestyle, I wanted the mixer for what it could do, not as a thing.

Edit to say, dang it, I was quoting FurryP and tried to edit out the quote in her post and everything disappeared!  Oh well.  This is why I liked bolding instead!

I've seen that movie but don't recall a blender scene.  Can you refresh my memory?

This post really struck a chord for me.
One day DH and I were at a department store and there were some very fancy towels on clearance.  I don't remember the brand, but they were super thick nice towels and marked down enough where they weren't ridiculously overpriced and we splurged and bought ourselves a nice matched set of hand towel and bath towel.  That doesn't sound like a big deal probably, but we generally buy our towels on clearance at Target, or maybe the Black Friday deal towels that Kohl's does.  

And when we saw them I was thinking that they were so nice that they were like something that we would buy to give someone as a wedding gift.  And then I thought, why can't we have the nice things that we would give someone else?  Why can't we give a gift like this to ourselves?  And that's why we bought them, as a gift to ourselves.

Now, I could go on to say that the point of the story is to live your best life, blah blah blah, but that isn't my point.  The most recent time I bought towels was on Black Friday at Kohl's, and honestly, we still have those fancy towels but they aren't our favorites.  We actually like the scratchier cheaper ones better.  The point of the story is why do we treat other people better than we treat ourselves?  Why did we think of the nice towels as gift material and not as something we could buy just because we wanted it? 

For me, a big part of that is simply financial.  But there's also that mindset that certain things are meant to be given/received as gifts and you don't buy them for yourself.  Getting back to the mixers, I wanted one for quite some time before I finally bought one.  And what put me over the edge to finally buying was reading some reviews on the Kohl's website.  There was a person who posted about spending years wanting a mixer and finally buying one and how they wished they had bought it sooner.  I realized that I didn't want to be that person, posting about all the years they had wished they had a mixer.  I wanted to be the other people, who were writing about how much they loved having a mixer.  

When I got married, we didn't have the registry and parties and stuff, and we only got 4 wedding presents, none of which were a Kitchen aid mixer.  I bought it for myself years later, as a gift to myself and I absolutely deserved that gift.  I love that mixer, I still remember the first recipe Mixie and I made together and not a day goes by that I don't look at him on that counter and think about how happy I am that I bought him.

And so finally at the end of this epic post, my point is this:  if you want a mixer, you go buy yourself one because I don't know a darn thing about you, but I know you deserve to have one if you want it and you don't need a wedding ring to prove that to anyone.