Anniversary Gifts
Do you have an anniversary coming up? And did you wonder how the first
wedding anniversary became the paper anniversary? Read on to find out how to
figure out what to get this year.
Traditional versus Modern versus…
First off, click
here for a list of all types of anniversary gifts from year 1
through year 100. Traditional wedding gifts were created to help the couple
build up their home over the years. Modern couples are more affluent and go into
marriage with a lot more household goods. So the Modern list was created and
shifted away from practical gifts to more luxury items.
The History
Anniversary gift giving dates back quite a long ways. There was evidence of
anniversary gifts from the middle ages. Originally, there were the big
anniversaries:
- 25 – Silver
- 50 – Gold
- 75 – Diamond
From
Elegant Anniversary:
“The practice of giving peculiar gifts on various wedding anniversaries
originated in Central Europe. Among the medieval Germans it was customary for
friends to present a wife with a wreath of silver when she had lived with her
husband twenty-five years. The silver symbolized the harmony that was assumed to
be necessary to make so many years of matrimony possible. On the fiftieth
anniversary of a wedding the wife was presented with a wreath of gold. Hence
arose ‘silver wedding’ and ‘golden wedding.’ This practice, borrowed from the
Germans, has been elaborated upon in modern times”
- INFORMATION ROUNDUP
by George Stimpson (1948)
Trivia
The best
wedding
anniversary trivia comes from Hallmark‘s Website:
Celebrating anniversaries has always been a popular custom. Early reasons to
celebrate were linked to cycles of life: seed-time, harvest-time, the changing
of seasons, and life events – the wedding, for example. The anniversary of the
wedding day became a legitimate reason to celebrate.
According to Hallmark research, the custom of associating silver with the
25th wedding anniversary and gold with the 50th wedding anniversary appear to
have originated in the Germanic region of Middle Europe. The silver anniversary
included a husband giving his wife a silver garland when they had been married
25 years. On the 50th anniversary, the husband gave the wife a wreath of
gold.
Currently two diamond anniversaries are celebrated – one at 60 and one at 75
years. The 75th anniversary is the original diamond anniversary and the 60th was
added when Queen Victoria (English Empire Monarch) celebrated her Diamond
Jubilee on her 60th anniversary of accession to the throne in 1897.
In 1922, Emily Post published the first known list of traditional anniversary
gifts. She expanded the list to include more years in 1957.
How do you celebrate your anniversaries?
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