Wedding Gift: Don’t Forget to Bring a Towel

Towels

Nice, fluffy, soft, voluminous towels are a very frequent item on a wedding gift registry.  However, like many wedding gifts, you might think that they are a bit too boring.  Awhile back, I wrote about making a Spa Gift Basket as a gift idea that works for towels.  This is a completely different spin on towels as a wedding gift.  Do your geek friends need a wedding gift?  This is the perfect solution.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Gift

Given that there is now a movie of the first book, in addition to the amazing original BBC Mini Series, the popularity of the number 42 and “Don’t forget to bring a towel” is much better than it has ever been, I think.  In case you have forgotten the reference, or if you have never read it before, here it is, in all its glory:

“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

– Quotation from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams www.douglasadams.com

Okay, that’s a gigantic quote, but what do I do now?

You buy some towels from the wedding registry.  You can give yourself a gold star if you are able to buy a whole set with your budget.  Sets are better than single towels, the couple is probably trying to replace a bunch of mismatched towels that they own already, that are scratchy and old now.

Next, when you write your awesome wedding card, include a print out of the above quote, or simplify it to say “Don’t forget to bring a towel.”  Next, pick up a copy of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy DVD or Blu-ray,, and add that to your gift.  Alternatively, you could opt for a set of the books.

There you have it, you’ve taken a bland wedding registry gift and turned it into one of the most fun wedding gift ideas around.  You’re pretty swell.

If you don’t want to go the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Route, you could pick the Towlie route from South Park instead.

Are you a fan of the hitchhiker’s guide?  Would you like this theme as a wedding gift?

[Photo – Creative Commons Attribution -puuikinbeach]