A milestone worth celebrating
12th Anniversary Gifts
Silk and linen are the traditional gifts and pearls the modern theme.
A genuine pearl white rose, finished with a lustrous glaze and 24 karat gold, is a lasting way to mark your first twelve years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Silk, Pearls and Jade: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
Silk for bedtime
Hallmark suggests washable silk pyjamas, which are far easier to live with than the dry-clean-only kind. A silk pillowcase or eye mask is a smaller version of the same idea.
Proper linen sheets
Hallmark points out that real linen sheets get better with time, which is a nice thing to say about a marriage too. Pick a colour you both like, and expect them to still be on the bed at twenty.
Pearls for every day
Pearls are the modern 12th anniversary gift. Studs or a single pearl on a fine chain suit everyday wear far better than a formal strand, and they go with everything from a T-shirt to a wedding outfit.
Oysters for two
As Hallmark says, you can’t have pearls without oysters. Book a long lunch somewhere with oysters on the menu, order a plate to share, and take the afternoon off.
A dozen of their favourites
Twelve years, twelve of something they love: pastries from the bakery they always detour past, bottles from a favourite winery, or their favourite flowers by the dozen.
Jade, for good luck
Jade is the 12th anniversary stone, and it’s really two materials, jadeite and nephrite. GIA notes that jadeite, the rarer of the two, is a symbol of good luck in East Asia, so a jade bangle or pendant comes with a wish attached.
The pearl white glazed rose
A pearl white rose to celebrate twelve years together
A genuine pearl white 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 twelve 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 12th means
Why silk and linen
for twelve years?
Silk and linen are the traditional gifts for a twelfth wedding anniversary. One is fine and soft, the other tough and practical, and twelve years of marriage calls for plenty of both.
Why silk and linen
Something fine, something hard-wearing
Silk is one of the strongest natural fibres, yet it feels like almost nothing against the skin. Chinese legend credits an empress, Leizu, with discovering it, and traces of silk found in Chinese tombs are about 8,500 years old.
Linen is the workhorse. It’s woven from the fibres of the flax plant and can be up to three times stronger than cotton. Twelve years in, a marriage has its share of both: the special-occasion silk, and the everyday linen that just keeps going.
Where it began
Silk and fine linen, since the 1870s
On the old lists, the twelfth was the only anniversary between the tin tenth and the crystal fifteenth. A Michigan newspaper’s list in 1876 gave it ‘the silk and fine linen’, and Brisbane’s Telegraph gave exactly the same pairing more than sixty years later, in 1937.
Pearls came much later, as the modern alternative. Hallmark now lists silk or linen as the traditional 12th anniversary gift and pearls as the modern one, and Debrett’s British list still gives silk and linen.
Around the world
Silk, flax and nickel
In France the twelfth is the noces de soie, the silk wedding, and Japan’s list offers a silk wedding or a flax wedding. Dutch lists give linen or silk, and Spanish lists give silk.
Germany is the odd one out. Its twelfth is the Nickelhochzeit, the nickel wedding, a name some German lists also use for the eighth.
12th anniversary symbols
Silk, jade and peonies
Silk, linen and pearls
Silk and linen have been the twelfth anniversary pair since at least the 1870s, and British, American and New Zealand lists still give them. Pearls are the modern alternative.
Jade
Australia has its own. In 1965 jade was found in the Minbrie Ranges near Cowell, on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, and more than 100 outcrops have since been found there, in what’s now called the Cowell Jade Province.
Peony
In Victorian flower language the peony could mean a happy life, or simply bashfulness. In China it’s called the king of flowers and the flower of riches and honour. Ants love the buds, so give cut stems a gentle shake before they come inside.
Celebrating the 12th
Make a little time for the two of you
Book a table at the restaurant where you had your engagement dinner, spend a slow Sunday in bed with the papers and good coffee, or take a day trip somewhere neither of you has been. Twelve years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
If you like a theme, plan twelve small dates for the year ahead and write each on a card: a walk, a film, a new restaurant, a night with the phones off. Draw one each month and take turns choosing.
A small gesture is enough. A few lines on the back of a photo from your wedding day, slipped into their wallet, will travel with them for years.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 12th means to others
Letters that capture twelve years
Twelve years in, you’ve probably been through a few chapters already: new jobs, new houses, maybe a baby or three. A letter is the place to say what has held steady through all of it. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about the twelfth anniversary.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Chris,
Twelve years. That’s a dozen Christmases at your mum’s, a dozen winters of you insisting it isn’t cold enough for the heater, and more school lunches than either of us can count, most of which you made.
This year you went back to study at forty-one, which I know scared you more than you let on. You passed every subject and still made it to every one of Grace’s netball games.
I don’t say it often enough, so here it is in writing: I’m proud of you, and I’d marry you again tomorrow.
Happy anniversary. The heater is on. Don’t argue.
All my love,
Kirsty
Dear Hana,
I was told the twelfth is the silk anniversary, so I went to buy you a silk scarf and came home with three, because I couldn’t choose and the woman in the shop could tell.
You’d have chosen in thirty seconds. That’s you all over: decisive where I dither, calm where I panic, funny exactly when we need it. The night the hot water system burst, you turned it into a camping trip for the kids.
Twelve years of being married to you has made me braver. I think it’s made me kinder too, though you’d be the one to ask.
Happy anniversary. Keep whichever scarf you like and I’ll return the other two. Probably.
Love,
Daniel
Dear Paul,
When we married, my two were nine and eleven, and they made it very clear they didn’t need another dad. You agreed with them. You said you’d settle for being the bloke who drove them to footy and fixed their bikes.
Twelve years later, Sam asked you to stand beside him at his own wedding, and Ella still rings you first whenever her car makes a funny noise.
You never pushed. You just stayed, and kept turning up, until there was no question you belonged.
Happy anniversary, from all three of us. The kids say this card is from them too, but I’m the one who loves you most.
Always,
Lou
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the twelve-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
For their 12th anniversary, Chip Gaines of the TV show Fixer Upper threw Joanna a surprise brunch for family and close friends in an unfinished barn on their farm. The table had linen napkins and place cards tied with silk string explaining the anniversary’s symbols, and Chip gave Joanna a pearl necklace from the jeweller who made her wedding ring. Their children arranged the flowers.
This wartime wedding dress is made of heavy-duty parachute silk and embroidered with pearls, the 12th anniversary’s traditional and modern gifts in one. Helen Drew, dressmaker to Mrs Winston Churchill, made it for a bride who married at St Matthew’s Church in Surbiton on 29 April 1944. The museum notes that the groom wore his uniform.
A short, charming entry from a 1910 American etiquette guide on throwing a twelfth anniversary party. Invitations were written in gold ink on linen doilies, the furniture was dressed in white linen covers and the room draped in flax-blue silk, with flax grown from seed for the table and candied violets on the desserts.
12th anniversary FAQ
