A milestone worth celebrating
10th Anniversary Gifts
Tin and aluminium are the traditional gifts and diamond jewellery the modern theme. Blue is the traditional tenth anniversary colour.
A genuine light blue rose, finished with a lustrous glaze and 24 karat gold, is a lasting way to mark your first ten years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Tin, Aluminium and Diamond: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
Ten years in a tin
Find an old biscuit or tea tin at a market and fill it with ten folded notes, one memory for each year you’ve been married. Put their favourite biscuits on top so the notes are a surprise.
Sit for a tintype
Tintypes were the everyday portraits of the 1860s and 1870s, and a few photographers still make them. The plate is actually thin iron, not tin, but you can keep that between the two of you.
A panel of pressed tin
In Australia, pressed metal ceilings are often called Wunderlich ceilings, after their best-known maker. Look for a reclaimed panel at a salvage yard and hang it as it is, or have it made into a mirror frame.
Your wedding photo on metal
Aluminium is the American alternative to tin. Have a favourite wedding photo printed onto an aluminium panel: it’s light, needs no frame and won’t rust.
A diamond for the decade
Diamond jewellery is the modern tenth anniversary gift. Small studs or a slim band set with diamonds are easy to wear every day, or take a tip from GIA and have the engagement ring upgraded.
Daffodils that come back
Plant a bag of daffodil bulbs together. They die back after flowering and come up again each spring, so you’ll have a reminder of this anniversary for years.
The light blue glazed rose
A light blue rose to celebrate ten years together
A genuine light blue rose with a lustrous glazed finish, its petals and leaves edged in 24 karat gold and its stem plated in matching gold. Each rose retains its individual shape and character, so no two are exactly alike—a lasting reminder of your first ten years together.
- Includes a certificate of authenticity
- Presented in a luxurious display case, inside a gloss white gift box bearing our debossed gold leaf logo
- A timeless symbol of love, preserved to keep forever
- Rose approximately 30 cm long; display case 34 cm long
What the 10th means
Why tin
for ten years?
Tin is the traditional gift for a tenth wedding anniversary, with aluminium as the American alternative. Both are everyday metals you’ll find in any kitchen, which suits a marriage built on ten years of ordinary days together.
Why tin
Soft on its own, strong in company
Tin is a soft metal that bends without much effort. Its real talent is protecting other things: a thin coat of tin keeps steel from rusting, which is why a tin can is really steel with a tin lining.
Mixed with copper, a little tin makes bronze, which is harder than copper alone and gave its name to the Bronze Age. Ten years in, you probably know which of you is the copper and which is the tin.
Where it began
Top hats and bonnets made of tin
By the 1860s, American couples were throwing tin wedding parties, and guests arrived with presents made of tin. Tinsmiths turned out joke versions of everyday things: fans, slippers, top hats and bonnets. The Henry Ford museum still has a tin bonnet made for a tenth anniversary between 1850 and 1875.
In Britain, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, revised in 1895, counts the anniversaries in fives: wooden at five, tin at ten, crystal at fifteen, then china, silver and gold.
Around the world
Roses, crystal and tin
In Germany the tenth is the Rosenhochzeit, the rose wedding, and the custom is for the couple to plant a rose bush in their garden.
Dutch lists offer crystal, steel, tin or rose for ten years. In France it’s the noces d’étain, the tin wedding, and Japanese lists give both a tin wedding and an aluminium wedding.
10th anniversary symbols
Tin, diamonds and daffodils
Tin, aluminium and diamonds
Tin is the traditional 10th anniversary gift on British and American lists, and American lists add aluminium. When aluminium was new it cost more than gold, and a bar of it went on show beside the crown jewels at the 1855 Paris Exhibition. Diamond jewellery is the modern choice.
Diamond
Diamond is so hard that only another diamond can scratch it. Gemmologists call its bright shine adamantine lustre, after the Greek adamas, and you’ll meet the stone again at the 60th, the diamond wedding.
Daffodil
In Victorian flower language the daffodil meant regard and unequalled love. It’s the national flower of Wales, and the flower William Wordsworth made famous after a walk beside Ullswater with his sister Dorothy in April 1802.
Celebrating the 10th
Make a little time for the two of you
Go back to where you spent your honeymoon, dig out the wedding video and watch it together, or book dinner somewhere neither of you has been before. Ten years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
If you like a theme, throw a tin wedding the 1870s way: invitations on cards wrapped in foil, drinks served in tin cups, and a request that friends bring the silliest tin present they can find.
None of it needs to be grand. A few lines left by the kettle on the morning of your anniversary can say plenty.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 10th means to others
Letters that capture ten years
Ten years in, you’ve shared far more ordinary Tuesdays than special occasions, and the Tuesdays are usually the bits worth writing down. A letter is the place to put them. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about reaching ten years.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Josh,
Ten years ago you stood at the front of a little church in Orange in a borrowed suit, trying very hard not to cry, and failing completely. I loved you for it. I love you more now that you cry at every school concert, including the recorder ones.
We’ve had three houses, two kids, one long year when your mum was sick, and a caravan holiday we’ve agreed never to mention. You were steady through every bit of it. You’re who I want beside me when the news is bad, and the first person I ring when it’s good.
Apparently tin is the tenth anniversary gift. So here is the biscuit tin, with the last chocolate one still in it. You know what that costs me.
All my love,
Claire
Dear Anna,
On the drive to our honeymoon you navigated us forty minutes in the wrong direction, then told me the scenery was the whole point. Ten years later, I’ve noticed you’re usually right about that sort of thing.
Since then you’ve changed careers, finished the degree you started before we met, and taught both girls to swim, while kindly pretending not to notice that I still forget which week is recycling.
I don’t say it often enough, so I’m writing it down where you can keep it: I’d marry you again tomorrow, and I’d still let you hold the map.
Happy tenth.
Love,
Nick
To us, ten years on,
The first time, we wrote our vows the night before, on the back of the seating plan. This time we’ve had ten years to work on them.
We promise to keep laughing at the same bad jokes, and to keep telling them to people who didn’t ask. To take turns being the sensible one. To keep the Sunday walk going, even in winter, even when the dog would rather stay home.
Back then we said ‘for better, for worse’ without knowing what either looked like. Now we do, and we’d still say yes.
Same time in another ten?
With love,
Both of us
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the ten-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
Two weeks after a friend talked her into giving away a favourite dress, Melissa met Pete at her best friend’s wedding, where she was a bridesmaid without a date. For their tenth anniversary she lists ten things marriage has taught her, from really listening to sharing the mental list of jobs around the house, with plenty of teasing about which of them knows more about hockey. Warm, funny and easy to borrow from.
Frederick and Mary Thompson invited 150 guests to their tin wedding in Canandaigua, New York, on 17 June 1867, ten years to the day after they married, with invitations framed in tin. Friends sent more than 200 tin presents, from a lantern and a top hat to an egg cooker with a timer, and Frederick catalogued the lot as ‘The Great Tin Museum’. A short two-page story with a photo of one of the invitations; 133 of the gifts still survive.
Martin and Ellen Flynn reached ten years of marriage in 1875, so in 2013 the staff at the Flynn Mansion, part of Living History Farms in Iowa, threw them a tin wedding. They made replica gifts (tin flowers, a fan, a top hat, a birdcage), baked a three-layer cake and borrowed ideas from an 1874 Iowa report of more than a hundred guests drinking from tin cups. A handy read if you’re planning a theme party.
10th anniversary FAQ
