A milestone worth celebrating
16th Anniversary Gifts
Wax is the traditional sixteenth anniversary gift on Hallmark’s list, with silverware as the modern alternative.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in pure silver, a lasting keepsake of sixteen years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Wax, Silver and Peridot: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
A candle-making class for two
Hallmark suggests a candle-making class, with a warning to watch out for hot wax. Choose the scent together, and you’ll each go home with a candle that smells like the afternoon.
A seal with your initials
A seal engraved with both your initials and a few sticks of red wax will close every birthday card and note for years. Hallmark suggests monogrammed wax seals as a gift for friends, and they make just as good a gift between the two of you.
Coffee in bed, done properly
Hallmark’s idea is a luxurious coffee-in-bed morning, served from silver. Even one good silver coffee pot makes a weekday breakfast feel like a hotel weekend.
One piece of sterling
Sterling silver is 92.5 per cent silver, with copper added because pure silver is too soft for everyday use. An old sterling cream jug or sugar bowl from an antique dealer is a small piece with a long history behind it.
Peridot, green from the deep
Peridot is the 16th anniversary stone. GIA says most of it was carried up to the surface by volcanic eruptions, and yellowish green is the shade you’ll see most often in jewellery. It is a birthstone for August.
Beeswax from the farmers’ market
Look for beeswax candles at a farmers’ market and ask the beekeeper where the hives are. Light one at dinner on your anniversary and keep the stub for next year.
The silver-dipped rose
A silver rose to celebrate sixteen years together
A genuine rose, chosen for its shape and finished in pure silver. Each rose retains its individual shape and character, so no two are exactly alike—a lasting reminder of your first sixteen years together.
- Includes a certificate of authenticity
- Presented in a luxurious display case, inside a gloss white gift box bearing our debossed silver leaf logo
- A timeless symbol of love, preserved to keep forever
- Rose approximately 29 cm long; display case 34 cm long
What the 16th means
Why wax and silver
for sixteen years?
Wax and silverware are Hallmark’s gifts for a sixteenth wedding anniversary. One gives you candlelight and the other a well-set table, and sixteen years in, an evening at home with both is worth planning.
Why wax and silver
Warmth and shine
Wax softens with a little warmth, takes whatever shape is pressed into it, and holds that shape once it cools. It isn’t a bad description of two people after sixteen years.
Some modern lists ask specifically for silver hollowware: the teapots, coffee pots, jugs and sugar bowls that hold something, as opposed to plates and cutlery. They are the pieces that come out when people gather, and by year sixteen there are usually plenty of people to gather.
Where it began
Proof that nobody had peeked
For centuries, letters were closed with sealing wax. A seal was hard to break without leaving a mark, so it showed the letter hadn’t been read on the way, and pressed with a signet ring, it showed who had sent it.
Medieval sealing wax was beeswax mixed with Venice turpentine, a resin from the larch tree, and later it was coloured red with vermilion. Once postal services took over, the seal became more ceremony than security, and traditional sealing wax is still made today for people who like to close a letter properly.
Around the world
Europe’s sapphire wedding
In much of Europe the sixteenth belongs to sapphire. It is the Saphirhochzeit in Germany and the noces de saphir in France, and the Dutch list gives saffier, sapphire, too.
English-language lists keep sapphire for the forty-fifth anniversary, so a sapphire at sixteen is a European habit. Japanese and Italian lists don’t give the sixteenth a name at all.
16th anniversary symbols
Wax, silver and peridot
Wax and silverware
Hallmark gives wax as the traditional 16th gift and silverware as the modern one. Other lists differ: New Zealand’s Te Ara gives tourmaline or silver hollowware, and the oldest lists skip the year entirely.
Peridot
Some peridot reached the earth inside meteorites. The ancient Egyptians called it the gem of the sun and mined it on an island in the Red Sea now known as Zabargad, or St John’s Island.
No set flower
None of the main lists gives a flower for the sixteenth. If you’d like one, borrow Spain’s: there the sixteenth is the ivy wedding, and in Victorian flower language ivy meant affection, friendship and fidelity.
Celebrating the 16th
Make a little time for the two of you
Go back to the restaurant from your first anniversary, walk the beach after dark with fish and chips, or spend a Saturday clearing out the shed together and reward yourselves with a long lunch. Sixteen years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
Set the table with the good silver and every candle in the house, including the ones in the emergency drawer. Hallmark even suggests an etiquette class, so you can finally learn which fork goes with which course; at your own table, nobody minds.
When the plates are cleared, put both phones in a drawer and tell them one thing you’ve never thanked them for.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 16th means to others
Letters that capture sixteen years
By sixteen years you have a shorthand: half-sentences, a look across the room, a sigh that means ‘your mother rang’. A letter is the place to spell things out in full, for once. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about year sixteen.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Nathan,
Sixteen years ago you dropped the ring during the vows and it rolled under the front pew. Your uncle crawled after it in his good suit, and he still mentions it every Christmas.
This year you learned to cook properly because I was working nights, and now I get your ‘famous’ lasagne whether I ask for it or not. You drove Josh to swimming at five every morning all winter and never once complained, at least not to him.
We have become the kind of couple who talk about mulch at parties. I wouldn’t swap it for anything.
Happy anniversary. I’ll light the candles; you hang on to the rings.
All my love,
Emma
Dear Grace,
Sixteen years ago we had a flat in Newtown with a gas heater that smelt funny and a landlord who never answered the phone. You made it feel like a palace with a string of fairy lights and a rug from the side of the road.
This year was hard. Your dad’s stroke, the drives to Wagga every weekend, the late-night calls to the hospital. You carried all of it, and still checked that I was okay.
I don’t say it often enough. You are the bravest person I know, and marrying you is the best thing I ever did.
Happy anniversary. This weekend: no drives, no phones, just us.
Love always,
Michael
Dear Pete,
Last year you forgot our anniversary until 9.40pm, when your sister texted ‘Happy anniversary, you two!’ and I watched the colour drain from your face.
You’ve been making up for it ever since: breakfast in bed, flowers on random Tuesdays, and a reminder set on three separate devices. You can stop now. I forgave you before you’d finished apologising, mostly because that face was the funniest thing I saw all year.
Sixteen years, and you still care this much about getting it right. That’s the part that counts.
Happy anniversary. Your phones went off at six this morning. All three of them.
Love,
Tash
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the sixteen-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
Mr and Mrs W. H. Watson saw their sixteenth anniversary as ‘a good excuse’ for a get-together of old friends and relations, and fifty guests were invited to their Melbourne home, some from as far away as New Zealand and Tasmania. Scottish pipers were booked to play during the evening, and a film of the Queen’s recent tour of Australia was to be shown. Mrs Watson planned to wear a frock of pink lace.
Canadian columnist Kelly Waterhouse wrote this just before her sixteenth wedding anniversary, admitting that she and her husband, whom she calls the Carpenter, had made no plans, much as they had never planned anything. She is funny and honest about how a long marriage can go stale if you let it, and why it takes effort to keep it fresh. She weighs up the traditional gifts, wax or silver hollowware, before deciding that what they have can’t be gift-wrapped anyway.
GIA’s short history of the 16th anniversary stone has a few surprises. Some historians believe Cleopatra’s famous emeralds may actually have been peridot, and several large gems in Europe that were long thought to be emeralds turned out to be peridots too.
16th anniversary FAQ
