Wedding anniversary names: choose a meaningful gift

Almost everybody knows silver, gold and ruby, and almost nobody knows what year four is. That is because only a handful of the names have any real currency; the rest were filled in later to complete a list.

This article gives the full traditional list, explains where it came from and why a second modern list exists, and covers the anniversaries that carry something beyond a name. It also looks at how the list differs between Britain and the US, which is the source of most of the disagreement online.

The older anniversaries are genuinely old. Silver at twenty-five and gold at fifty were marked in central Europe well before the nineteenth century, with wreaths of silver and gold given to the wife, and those two names spread widely.

Everything between them arrived much later. Lists naming a material for each of the first fifteen years appear in the late nineteenth century, and the version most people now recognise was substantially fixed by a 1937 list published in the United States by a jewellers association.

That origin explains two things. It explains why the early years use cheap materials and the later years use precious stones, which is a sales structure rather than a symbolism. And it explains why there are competing versions: several commercial lists were published within a few decades of each other and none of them ever became authoritative.

So the honest summary is that a small number of these names are traditional in any meaningful sense and the rest are conventional. That does not make them useless, but it does mean nobody is doing it wrong.

The list below is the commonly used British version. Where the American list differs, both are shown.

Beyond sixty the list thins out and the versions diverge sharply. Sixty-five is usually blue sapphire, seventy is platinum, and seventy-five is diamond again in most British versions and diamond and gold in some American ones.

Ivory at fourteen is the one worth updating. The trade is banned or heavily restricted almost everywhere, and the modern substitutions are anything carved, anything cream-coloured, or simply a different gift.

A second list, usually described as modern, was published in the twentieth century and runs alongside the traditional one. It replaces materials with categories of object: clocks for the first year, china for the second, crystal or glass for the third, appliances for the fourth, silverware for the fifth, and so on through to jewellery.

It exists for a straightforwardly commercial reason: paper and cotton are difficult to sell at any margin, and clocks and appliances are not. Whether that bothers you is a matter of taste.

In practice most people use a hybrid. The traditional name is used for the anniversary itself, because silver wedding and ruby wedding are what people actually say, and the gift is whatever suits. The material becomes a prompt rather than an instruction.

There are also flower and gemstone lists, again largely modern, which give a bloom and a stone for each year. Carnations for the first, roses for the fifteenth, yellow roses for the fiftieth. They are useful mainly for anyone buying flowers who wants a reason to choose one over another.

None of these lists agrees with the others, and no source has authority over them. If two lists disagree, either answer is defensible.

A handful of years are marked beyond the name, and in Britain some of them come with an actual entitlement.

• Twenty-five, silver. The first anniversary people commonly hold a party for.
• Forty, ruby. Widely marked, and the name is in common use.
• Fifty, gold. The big one, and often the occasion for a family gathering on the scale of a small wedding.
• Sixty, diamond. In Britain the association with Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee of 1897 fixed the name firmly.

In the United Kingdom, couples reaching a sixtieth, sixty-fifth or seventieth wedding anniversary, and every year after the seventieth, can apply for a congratulatory message from the monarch. It has to be requested rather than arriving automatically, and applications are made in advance through the relevant office. The equivalent exists in several other countries, including greetings from the White House in the United States and from the Governor General and the Prime Minister in Canada and Australia.

Religious traditions add their own markers. Many churches will offer a blessing or a renewal of vows for a significant anniversary, and a golden wedding blessing is a common request.

If you are organising something for a fiftieth or sixtieth, the practical points are the same as for a wedding on a smaller scale: an accessible venue, a short programme, seating that lets people hear each other, and an early finish. For the card, there are anniversary wishes for partners, parents and friends to adapt.

The names are most useful as a prompt when you have run out of ideas, which is roughly what year seven feels like.

Three ways people actually use them:

1. Literally, as a theme. Paper for the first year becomes tickets, a book, a print, a framed copy of something. Wood for the fifth becomes a piece of furniture or a tree.
2. Loosely, as a colour or a material. Ruby becomes anything red rather than an actual ruby, which matters at year forty.
3. Not at all. Which is what most couples do, and the list survives anyway.

Two habits are worth more than any gift list. Repeat something rather than buying something: the same restaurant, the same walk, the same photograph taken in the same place each year. And write it down; a card kept each year builds into the only record of a marriage most couples will ever have.

For the first anniversary specifically, paper has an obvious and genuinely good application. The photographs from the wedding are usually still sitting on a drive, and a printed album is the version that survives a change of phone. The same is true of anything you gathered on your wedding website, which is worth exporting rather than assuming it will still be there in ten years.

One last practical note about the later years. Anniversaries after a fiftieth increasingly involve people who cannot travel easily, and the gift matters far less than the visit. Whatever the list says the year is made of, the answer at that point is usually time.