Since Amazon doesn’t seem to have an easy way for you to email a prioritized version of your wishlist to your friends and family, here’s the steps on how to avoid having the most recent items be the only ones your family sees :

Prioritize your wishlist - No, I’m not being cheeky here. The first thing you need to do is assign a priority to every item on your list. The quickest way to do this is to click on the “Compact View” link at the top of your wishlist and make all the updates at once. Once you’ve given every item on the page a 1-5 rank, don’t forget to click the “Save Changes” button.

Email your wishlist to yourself - You could go through the long, convoluted URL that’s currently in your browser to find your user ID, but this is a bit easier. Just send the “Share Your Wishlist” notification to your email and you’ll get a URL that’ll look something like this :

http://amazon.com/gp/registry/1BL4NBBAVVCQE

The portion in red at the end is the user ID I was referring to.

Put your user ID in a new URL - Copy your user ID from the step above and place it into the URL below in the place that’s also in red :

http://amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html/
?id=1BL4NBBAVVCQE&sort=priority

Once you’ve done that, put the URL into your browser. You should now see the items you want the most at the top of your page.

Email your new URL to your friends and family - Don’t bother with the impersonal email notifications from Amazon. Write your own letter to your loved ones and avoid the middle-man. If you feel a little weird about sending it yourself, use your email to ask for wishlists from everyone else.

(Bonus Step) - If you don’t want Amazon to have a virtual monopoly over your online purchases, use the comments field of your wishlist to give alternate suggestions for items that aren’t available on Amazon or to point people towards places they can get the items cheaper. My wishlist has a couple items that say things like “I’d love to have this, but don’t spend more than $40 for it”.

Yes, it’s a little complicated, but until Amazon offers the obvious feature to prioritize the wishlist that you share by default, this is the best way to do it (as far as I know). If there’s a simpler solution (that doesn’t involve me writing a javascript application to take care of steps 2 & 3 automatically), I’d love to hear it.