I'm having my friends shower and DH's family shower after the LO gets here. We (my hostesses and I) chose this mostly because of my due date, mid-January. I didn't want one during the Christmas season as we often have too many commitments as it is (throw in the fact that we bought a new house and decided to move Nov. 30th, it's been hectic to say the least).
I have had one shower with my side of the family (I know 3 showers sound weird, but it's the way it's always been done in our circle of friends and family mostly due to the sizes of the families), and we received many wonderful gifts, but most of the big ticket stuff, we purchased ourselves. I'm not comfortable asking people to spend that kind of money on me, and I wanted some higher end things, so I just bought it myself.
One thing I don't have a lot of is clothes, and that's where an after baby shower is great. We didn't find out the sex, so what I do have is just white, brown and gray 0-3 month stuff. Once LO gets here, I'm pretty sure most of the shower gifts will be clothing and outfits because, let's face it, it's way more fun to buy a cute outfit than a bottle pack.
No one has acted weird when I told them to look for invites in Feb. In fact, many were happy they didn't have to worry about finding room for another thing on the calendar.