Christening with a bank account number: the gift is no longer voluntary

A bank account number on the christening invitation: useful gift or a fee?

On the table, next to the church reminder and the time of the meal, there is a bank account number. It is not handwritten or on a separate piece of paper: it is printed below the text, as if it were part of the protocol. The scene has been repeated at weddings for years and is now creeping into christenings, first communions and even children's birthday parties. Whoever tells it sums it up with a joke that is not entirely a joke: “I’ll have the electricity and water bills direct-debited to it.”

The question the issue drags along is simple. If someone invites you to a christening, are they really inviting you or passing on the bill for their celebration? Some of those invited say the account number turns the gift into a fee. Others say it is the most convenient option for everyone. And in the middle, the menu.

From invitation to deposit: how the bank-account envelope works

The mechanism is identical in every format: the invitation —wedding, christening, first communion— is sent out and at the bottom there is a bank account number. In theory, anyone who wants to give a gift can do so by transfer. In practice, critics argue, the guest ends up covering the cost per head that the hosts have paid. In one described case, the celebration brought together between 200 and 300 people with a menu estimated at 100 euros per head. The reader does not need to do the multiplication.

That is the point almost no one disputes: when the amount is communicated, or when the account number travels in print, the gift stops looking like a gesture and starts looking like a fee. Put bluntly, christening and wedding as a business, with the honeymoon paid for by the guests.

What a banquet costs and how much is expected of the guest

The figures handled by the guests themselves show the scale of the mismatch. A 1998 wedding, with twelve diners, cost about 7,000 pesetas per person, around 40 euros. An ordinary wedding menu is around 100 euros per head, and some celebrations raise the price communicated to friends to 200. The contrast is better understood with a restaurant fact: in a medium-sized city you can eat for 35 or 40 euros per person, tasting menu included, and that same money in an events venue buys a mediocre menu.

In defence of the venues, it is argued that the price is not just the food. It includes waiters keeping glasses topped up for hours, an exclusive space with its own toilets and an open bar that at a wedding stretches into the early hours. With the number of guests booked in advance, the organiser buys without the risk of running out. Whether that is worth twice as much as an ordinary restaurant is, at the very least, debatable.

Those who defend the bank account: it's the most practical option

The rejection is not unanimous. Some argue that including the account on the invitation saves everyone the hassle of memorising twenty digits and prevents the venue from filling up with cutlery, trays and figurines nobody asked for. It is the practicality argument, and it has a corollary: at more than one wedding with no printed number, guests ended up asking the family for the account so they could make the transfer. In one account, the couple refused to include it because it was tacky and still received a pile of envelopes.

Against that backdrop, the line between convenience and demand depends on a small detail: whether the number appears as an option or as an instruction. And on whether someone types a reference for the transfer.

The guest's ways out: an excuse, baby clothes or not going

The invitees who do not accept the format have a repertoire. The mildest: buy a gift for the child —clothes, which always get parents through a season— and not go to the cash machine. The most expedient: not going. Some say they simply do not attend any event whose invitation includes a bank account number, and that they need no excuse because the reason is a matter of principle. And some respond with health: coming down with something contagious two days beforehand.

The problem is the social cost. Refusal is read as an affront and, at family celebrations, the family relationship carries weight—precisely what some call an aggravating factor. A repeated response is the most basic: anyone who doesn't want to spend shouldn't go, but shouldn't complain either. The counter-response circulates just as insistently: if you invite me, don't charge me.

From christening to a ten-year-old's birthday party

The spread of the model is what is most unsettling. Cash envelopes are no longer just a wedding thing: at a ten-year-old's birthday party, the birthday boy's mother demanded envelopes instead of gifts, and guests went to the cash machine for antiestéticar of reprisals at school. Ten euros inside the envelope for a party that, according to the account, wasn't even worth the money. If that happens at that scale, no one should be surprised that the christening with a bank account stops being an anecdote and becomes an established formula.

It remains to be seen whether the custom prevails out of usefulness or out of laziness about discussing it out loud. Because discussing it has a price, and it is not always the price of the menu.

A wedding with no account numbers and an unexpected outcome

There is one case told to close any argument. A wedding with twelve diners, at about 40 euros per head, where the couple refused gifts. Three guests insisted —one with 50,000 pesetas, two with 25,000 each— and the others did what they could: a dinner service, a few loose gifts, nothing. Years later, the person who organised it confesses that they still remember who gave nothing. The bank account number, at least, leaves no doubt about who is on the list and who is not.