"Your Presence at Our Wedding Is Present Enough": Lies, Coding, Maintaining Personal Face, and the Cash Gift

In the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, the word presentation—signifying a cash wedding gift as an alternative to material objects, and usually stated on the lower right-hand corner of the wedding invitation—has become recognized, if somewhat controversial, across class, linguistic, and ethnocultural boundaries. Both implicit and complicit coding methods overshadow or disguise the transactional nature of the cash gift in order to make the request more polite. Presentation is echoed in such forms as rhymed cash requests and themed receptacles, which likewise disrupt the economistic undertones of the cash gift while maintaining the personal face of the wedded couple and their guests. We argue that such customs offer layered codes that not only reinforce the taboo on requesting cash, but critique capitalism's invasion of this rite of passage and its associated events.