We has some amount of being bowled over. One of our guests went "off registry" and got us a hand-carved wood bowl. At least it was small enough to be reasonably easy to handle. A closer relative has some sort of mental short circuit and came to the conclusion that a desktop grandfather-ish clock contraption was just absolutely the perfect gift. They spent a sizable amount of money on it. It's never been out of its box. And never will be. And, they bought it from some obscure location where I can't return it. And where on earth could I ever re-gift it? One guy gave an ice cream maker (because "that's what he always gives"). At least it was easy to return.

In my Jewish family, cash gifts are quite common, particularly for bar/bat mitzvahs (implicit expectation: the money will be invested to send the kid to college) but also for weddings. Several people made sizable gifts. We also did a wedding registry (online at Bed Bath and Beyond) and got ourselves a nice dish pattern and so forth. One relative decided that she could find a better price on some of the bits elsewhere, causing us to ultimately end up with uneven numbers of side plates. Could be worse, but not really a big deal.

In my wife's midwestern family, buying from the registry seemed to be the common answer. I don't think anybody gave cash, but my memory is fading.

In our paper invitation, we said nothing whatsoever about gifts. On our web page (URL included on the paper), we had links to the registry.

We certainly had no expectation of anybody giving anything in particular. There are non-trivial differences in the purchasing power of some of our friends and relatives. In the end, we roughly broke even, but that's largely due to a, umm, long tailed distribution of gifts.