Wedding Anniversary

Every year we wait for it, and every year when it arrives it feels like it means a little bit more than it did the year before. That’s the thing about anniversaries. They’re not like birthdays or Christmas. They celebrate more than just a person. They celebrate a promise made years ago and kept since. With anniversary gifts, it matters how you get it right. It’s a feeling that’s difficult to put into words but you know it immediately when you see it wrong. So we thought about it. A lot. Less about what fits into predefined material categories – though some of those have pointed us toward things we’re genuinely excited about – and more about what actually works when you’re trying to say something with a gift. Could you convey an honest truth about a relationship without veering into “are-you-kissing-your-mOTHER-young-man” territory? That’s the thing most anniversary gifts suffer from. They lean too hard in one direction and become sterile, or too hard in the other and are cringe-worthy. Every single piece of content in this anniversary gift guide was handpicked by us and centered around a specific couple. Young couples celebrating their first anniversary. Couples who have been together for years looking for ideas for a silver anniversary. Couples who have celebrated their fortieth anniversary and have a good sense of what does and doesn’t feel meaningful to them. The gift you’d get for two people who have been married for three years will never be the same as the one you’d get for two people who have been married for thirty and we’ve done our best to honor that instead of providing you with some middle-ground, safest-answer option. Some of our recommendations are things you can hold in your hands and admire as they fill your house with beauty. Other suggestions are experiences because sometimes the best present you can give a couple is some alone time with all the hard thinking already taken care of. And some of them are intensely personal in that special kind of way that requires slightly more effort but feels a thousand times more unique than some generic gift bought off a list. There are no jokes here. We don’t pad out our gift guides with extra products to make us money from advertising. If it’s in here, it earned its spot just like that’s the only criteria we’ll ever ask of anything on Reef of Death.

10th Anniversary

Ten years isn’t nothing. It’s a decade spent choosing each other for the mundane and the hard and the genuinely good bits, and you deserve a gift that recognises that weight without acting all stuffy about it. Traditionally speaking the material in question is tin or aluminium, which honestly sounds really boring until you realise how much you can do with that once you start looking. We looked. We searched far and wide, questioning all the connections we had and chasing down fine dinnerware and bespoke jewellery makers until we had compiled something truly unique. This collection of items was…

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15th Anniversary

Fifteen years is a long time to love someone well. It falls into this weird gap between bust-the-celebration-for-reaching-hallowed-ground territory and Those Big Round Numbers that everyone likes to throw parties for. Which means it’s also prime forgetting territory; Sure, celebrate it with something nice. But not…actual celebrating territory. And that’s a damn shame for an anniversary that we think totally deserves to be celebrated. Crystals are the traditional fifteenth anniversary gift. We’re into it. There’s an inherent seriousness and heft to crystals that feels perfect for a relationship that’s survived long enough to know its own form. To have been…

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1st Anniversary

Anniversaries are one of those things that seem straightforward until you’re tasked with actually doing one. A year wedding. Don’t get us wrong, that’s not nothing. It’s more than a card and a reservation at someplace nice. Finding that perfect something for your first anniversary though? That is universally harder than people realize. Go big and you’re playing catch up. Go small and well…you look cheap. That’s why we’ve assembled some of our favourite ideas for your first anniversary. Traditionally the first year is all about paper, which we think is charming as all get out. Paper also implies that…

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20th Anniversary

Twenty years is not nothing. Twenty years is school runs and hospital waits and Sunday mornings bleurring into one another and arguments that got swiftly resolved and others that festered longer than they should have and somewhere in there is a choice that keeps getting made year after year. This is what your twentieth anniversary actually is. It deserves something to match. Traditionally speaking, the gift for a twentieth anniversary is china. We like that idea. There’s something comforting in the notion that something can appear so fragile yet still endure; that you treat nice things so they stay nice.…

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25th Anniversary

Twenty five years is not nothing. It’s 25 years of choosing each other through all life throws at you. From the boring bits and the hard bits and all the run of the mill days in between. The kind that quietly add up to something remarkable, that’s what you celebrate at 25 years together. But that’s also what makes buying for this anniversary so difficult. There’s a lot to live up to and a gift that doesn’t feel like it matches the importance feels like an insult with a bow on it. That meant we had a lot to think…

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2nd Anniversary

Two years in is a strange and specific place to buy a gift for. Your first anniversary feels like it has some ceremony to it. And then as you get further down the road the milestone numbers sort of do the heavy lifting for you. But two years sort of sits quietly in the middle. It’s significant, but in a way that doesn’t announce itself. And finding something that speaks to that feels important, but also requires more thought than most folks will give it. The traditional material for a second anniversary is cotton. Ugh, we know. Cotton. It’s that…

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30th Anniversary

Thirty years is no small feat. It’s enough time to weather something real. To pick each other again and again on easy days and on days that very much did not look like celebrating. If you’re buying a gift for a thirty year anniversary, you understand that instinctively. You know that a present won’t do. It needs to be special, thoughtful, and impossible to mistake for another milestone gift with a number changed. The occasion itself demands it, so your gift should too. As you might have guessed, pearl is the traditional thirty year anniversary gift. If you love the…

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3rd Anniversary

Three years is an odd anniversary. It doesn’t have the gravitas of five or ten, it doesn’t get celebrated quite as much as your first, but trust us, three is actually one of the better ones if you think about it. By year three you really know each other. The shiny new has worn down to reveal something hopefully better and definitely more sturdy. This anniversary deserves a gift that reflects that. Not just another bunch of flowers and a card. Leather is the traditional third anniversary material. We like traditions that have some sense behind them. Leather is tough…

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4th Anniversary

Four years in feels like one of those milestones that flies quietly under the radar. It’s not year one with all the fireworks, but it’s also not year five or whatever benchmark everyone else seems to judge their relationship by. If you think about it though, four years is the one. Four years IN together and you’ve passed the honeymoon period, the everyday dinners and date nights and the hard bits too. That’s worth celebrating. Traditionally, the fourth anniversary is celebrated with fruit or flowers. Oranges. Lilies. Move over Father John Misty, we’re about to make symbols shiny again. When…

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5th Anniversary

Five years is not nothing. It’s when a relationship progresses from the rushed-updates-over-coffee in-between-two-other-committments phase into something hopefully closer to what you actually imagined. You really know each other by now. The little stupidities that poke each other every morning, the private jokes that require no context, the way your person lifts their coffee mug without ever thinking to ask. You deserve to celebrate that properly, not with whatever you could pick up whilst eating your lunch because you forgot about the date. As such, the traditional fifth anniversary gift of wood seemed like either a wonderfully limiting or extremely…

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6th Anniversary

Six years is a weird anniversary. It comes after all the big ones that get all the attention, after the first, skips the fifth and lands quietly six years in without anyone having given it too much thought. Which sucks, because choosing each other for six years is something that deserves more than a card you stopped to pick up on the way home. The traditional sixth anniversary gift is candy. Or, in some lists, iron. We think that’s interesting as a combination more than most people would at first glance. Candy, because your relationship has probably gotten truly sweet…

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