Two weeks to go
Our one year wedding anniversary is two weeks from today – on September 1st (Labor Day).
We haven’t planned anything to celebrate, besides the tradition of eating the top of our wedding cake, which has been sitting in our freezer, in plain site for so long, I am surprised I have not devoured it already.
What I’m (we’re, really) wondering is, do people following the anniversary gift-giving traditions? For example, the “traditional” gift for one year of marriage is paper, and the modern gift is clocks. Does the wife actually give her husband something made out of paper – tickets, a painting, whatever – or a clock, watch, etc.? Yeah, it’s a silly question, but it must be tradition for some reason.
What did you do to celebrate? Or what would you do?
Themocracy
If I was really creative it might be fun to take traditional anniversary gifts and make them more modern and useful. But I’m not, so I’ll skip all that stuff. We went to Hawaii for our first anniversary, but didn’t give each other any actual gifts.
i’m so curious to see what people say about this – the “traditional” marriage gifts always seem so weird to me.
maybe you can combine them! make.. uh… a clock out of origami. 🙂
For our 7 year anniversary of our first date, we got married… LOL Actually it was a week before our 7 year anniversary of our first date that we got married… so close.
Now we have a new anniversary date for next year.
For our first anniversary, I gave my husband tickets to a concert. I followed the traditional gifts pretty closely until about 10 years and then I kind of got lazy and didn’t do it anymore. I don’t think it matters if you do them or not, but it was fun for me to creatively try to get something useful/fun out of what the gift was supposed to be.
We’ve done a little bit of everything over these past 23 years. We mainly just go out and spend time alone together. A little dinner, maybe a movie or comedy club, coffee/dessert, lots of conversation, and sex. Nothing too exciting. Nothing too wild or out of the ordinary. Just the two of us spending time with our favorite person on earth.
Hmm. That’s a good question. I don’t think I’d follow tradition, but I’m not sure? Since it’s a holiday weekend, I’d take off for a few days on a fun, cheap road trip to somewhere near by. Or go to a cute bed and breakfast for the weekend!
Well, we actually filed for divorce around our 1st anniversary so that’s kinda like paper? We laugh about it now…
I would totally go non-traditional, myself. It’s like a group birthday or something.
Kosh and I don’t bother with traditions, but coincidentally for our 1st anniversary he got us tickets (paper!) to the family Guy Live in Chicago event 🙂 never knew that the modern gift for the 1st anniversary is/was clocks!
slightly-related aside: Interestingly enough, from an asian perspective, specifically the Chinese/Feng Shui perspective, giving of a timekeeping device i.e. clocks/watches is supposed to be bad, supposedly it puts a time limit to the friendship between giver/receiver (I suppose it’s a bad omen if the device stops working?), so I clocks are no-nos for any type of gift! interesting, eh? on the other hand, the traditional wedding gift in switzerland is a nice ornate clock to go on your mantlepiece!
btw – an origami clock – LMAO excellent!! 🙂
Jenn – I like your style. I’d much rather take a trip. We don’t need anything else, and I DO need to relax!
Alice – Yeah, it seems weird to me too. I wonder how the traditions even started. I suppose I would find out if I actually read the link I posted. Ha ha.
martymankins – Isn’t that kind of weird? Setting a new anniversary date? Our wedding anniversary is 10 days before our “dating anniversary,” and we were dating for 5 years so that felt kind of significant.
tori – I did find a website that came up with creative ideas like that! It’s more fun (and personal) than following the tradition “by the book.”
ajooja – I would LOVE to go someplace romantic for a nice dinner, then maybe a movie followed by cudding at home in bed… anything to bring back those fun feelings of being on a date!
marissa – There is so much we could see and do around Chicago in a road trip… that’s not a bad idea!
em – LOL! I am happy you can joke about it! 😛 I think we will end up being non-traditional (Except for that cake!)… and probably not even do anything (if at all) until later in the year.
*lynne* – Wow! That is really interesting about clocks being a bad omen. Hmm. Steven and I have already both given each other watches. Should we stop?! 🙂 I like the origami clock idea too. I bet something like that even exists.
Yeah, it is kind of odd to have two dates, especially a week apart. It’s like having a birthday close to Christmas (my wife’s daughter’s birthday is Dec 28th… she knows the close celebration times.
I remember for our first year I gave him an orgami making kit to throw in with his real present. If I can find something traditional with a twist I will add it as a throw in. I hope you guys do something you absolutely love on your anniv!
Kevin totally did the traditional gifts for the first 10 years. It got to be kind of a pain though, when you get weird like tin, linen, etc. We decided from the tenth that there on out we would only do trips for anniversaries – no more gifts.
The tenth was a big one for us and we went on a huge trip, the smaller anniversaries in between usually mean a night downtown in a nice hotel.
martymankins – It will be hard to forget one and celebrate the new one! (Steven’s bday is Dec 22nd. Poor guy 🙁 )
Gina (Mannyed) – That’s a cute idea! Throw something small in just to stick with tradition a bit. I like it.
Beth – I LOVE the trip idea. LOVE IT. Even getting away to a hotel in a different city. Spending quality time with Steven is better than receiving a silly gift (although, he never gives me silly gifts… so he would probably be getting the silly thing)
You could go with a print of this Dali work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persistence_of_Memory