Baby Shower Return Gifts

About

Return gifts for a seemantham, valaikappu or godh bharai The ceremony has a different name in every part of India, and the return gift is the one thing every version of it has in common. Seemantham, also sreemantham, srimantham or seemantha, across the Telugu and Kannada south. Valaikappu in Tamil Nadu, named for the bangles slid onto the mother's arms. Godh bharai in the north and in Hindi, meaning the filling of the lap. Shrimant, or dohale jevan, in Maharashtra. In English, simply the baby shower. Whichever one you have been invited to, the guests who come to bless the mother are sent home with something, and it is usually the last thing anybody plans and the first thing every guest handles. Almost all of those guests are women, most of them from the two families, and they are handed the same thing at the door within a few minutes of each other. That is the whole design problem, and it decides everything below. What this costs a head, and when we are the wrong shop Most people looking for this are looking with a number attached: under 200 a head, under 100, sometimes under 50. The gift blogs that rank for these terms advise somewhere between 150 and 500 a piece, and they are right about the market. A fifty guest list at 200 a head is already a serious sum. We do not sit in that band, and there is no point pretending otherwise. Under 500 a head there is nothing here at all. The smallest pieces start at about a thousand rupees, and the designs that exist in enough depth to cover a whole guest list in one finish sit a little above that. Below a thousand a head we are the wrong shop, and nothing on this page will make us the right one. What is right below that is what families have always done: a sweet box from a good local shop, glass or metal bangles at a valaikappu where they are part of the rite in any case, a small packet of kumkum and haldi, or a steel item. We make none of those, so this is not a nudge toward a cheaper page of ours. If the budget per guest is