I think it's interesting how jobs are seen as easy and not really something comparable even though people can spend so much effort and self image on their career and it's part of what enables people to survive. I think it comes into play the going back and forth idea of some people seeing something as hard meaning it deserves something while others discuss the same thing as easy.
Maybe it's because I've had a career pulled out from under me due to health issues and know others who've had the same. I've been there when someone, after years of surgery, physical rehabilitation, and fears he'd never be employable again and be stuck constantly proving his medical needs to the government to survive, got the call that he was being offered a position. I imagine we may have confused the person offering as he started to cry and then I started to cry. I honestly found that far more life changing, worthy of acknowledgement (and involved far more new expenses and things to consider) than when I married someone I was already living with.
Maybe there needs to be more acknowledgement that some life things some find easy, are things others practically break themselves down for trying to achieve.
When a couple choses to elope, apart from parents and siblings possibly, how do you think others celebrate?
People get presents when they get married or have a christening etc because they organise an event and invite friends and family.
I eloped, and was sent gifts months after we married from people after they found out. Mostly older people within my spouse's family, but I remember all of them.
When I organized a 10th anniversary party, what we joked as our very belated reception, I don't recall getting presents. I didn't expect them either, people coming was enough. We were going through a shite time as a family (his brother ended up unable to make it as he was too shattered from chemo, we would lose him and five others in the few year after), it was just enough to bring as many people together as we could and have something nice.
With children, especially my first, I got gifts from people that I didn't even know, still haven't met because they were friends with my in-laws and some people just like an excuse to buy cute things. I didn't have a baby shower, didn't organize any sort of party -- some people just like buying things and found their friend's son having a kid a suitable excuse. I've found myself more than once being the receptacle for other people's desire to buy kids' stuff - it's nice, but it's not anything I've organized.
Our culture and all cultures have gifts to incentivise these occasions.
Many predecessors to modern baby showers were about acknowledging the risks the mother was going through, and giving her physical and spiritual sustenance for the latter parts of pregnancy and early new born days (and in some traditions purification in case the worst happened). It was less incentivizing, more ritualizing the help given at a risky time in life.
Some cultures still do that, but I wouldn't say British cultures do. I don't think baby showers or the random gift giving I experienced are incentives - they're rooted in helping to carry the load, but in practice it's just a way of connecting through gift giving, the gift giving being what British culture tends to incentivize more than connecting.