A milestone worth celebrating
24th Anniversary Gifts
Opal is the traditional twenty-fourth anniversary gift, with musical instruments as the modern alternative.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of twenty-four years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Opal, Music and Tanzanite: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
Black opal from Lightning Ridge
GIA describes Lightning Ridge, a small town in New South Wales, as famed for its prized black opal. Choose the stone together, in person, so you can both watch how the colours move before you decide.
A stone with your names on it
Hallmark’s year-by-year list makes the twenty-fourth the stone anniversary. Have a smooth garden stone engraved with your initials and wedding date, and set it somewhere you pass every day, like the path to the clothesline.
Learn an instrument together
Hallmark suggests renting instruments and learning to play together for a week or a month. A ukulele is a kind choice for two beginners, and the neighbours will forgive four strings sooner than a drum kit.
Good seats, for once
Hallmark’s splurge idea is really great seats for a concert of their choosing. Skip the back row this time and sit close enough to see the drummer’s face.
The song from your first dance
Hallmark suggests sheet music for the song you danced to at your wedding. Have the opening bars framed with your wedding date underneath, even if neither of you can read a note.
Tanzanite, from one place on earth
Tanzanite is the 24th anniversary gemstone, and GIA says it is found in only one place: the hills of northern Tanzania, in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. Tilt it and you’ll see three distinct colours, depending on the angle.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate twenty-four years together
A genuine rose preserved and finished in 24 karat gold over 60 steps and many months, then polished by hand. Each rose retains its individual shape and character, so no two are exactly alike—a lasting reminder of your first twenty-four 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 29 cm long; display case 34 cm long
What the 24th means
Why opal
for twenty-four years?
Opal is the traditional gift for a twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. Its colours change every time it moves, and after twenty-four years you’ll know the feeling: the same person, with a new side to them every few months.
Why opal
Colour from tiny spheres of silica
The flashes of colour in precious opal come from light diffracting around microscopic spheres of silica, stacked, in GIA’s words, like tiny ping-pong balls in a box. Turn the stone and the colours shift and flare.
Australian opal formed when silica-rich groundwater seeped through cracks in ancient sandstone, became trapped, and slowly hardened, first into a gel and then into opal. Slow, under pressure, and worth the wait: there are worse descriptions of twenty-four years together.
Where it began
The gemstone Australia made its own
Australia produces about 95 per cent of the world’s precious opal, and opal is the national gemstone. It was first mined commercially at Listowel Downs in Queensland in 1875, and by 1932 Australia was the world’s major producer.
One famous field began by chance. In 1915 a fourteen-year-old boy, out with a group prospecting for gold, found opal at what became Coober Pedy. Lightning Ridge in New South Wales is known for black opal, and Queensland’s boulder opal comes from around Quilpie, Yowah and Winton.
Around the world
Satin, granite and a year without a name
French lists call the twenty-fourth the noces de satin. Spanish lists give granite, which lines up neatly with Hallmark’s year-by-year list, where the twenty-fourth is the stone anniversary.
German, Dutch, Italian and Japanese lists leave the year out and go straight to the twenty-fifth. That makes the twenty-fourth one of the quieter anniversaries, and yours to mark however you please.
24th anniversary symbols
Opal, tanzanite and zinnias
Opal, stone and music
Hallmark’s guide to the year gives opal as the traditional gift and musical instruments as the modern one, and its year-by-year list calls the twenty-fourth the stone anniversary. The Knot also gives musical instruments as the modern gift.
Tanzanite
In 1967 a Maasai tribesman came across blue-violet crystals at Merelani in northern Tanzania. Tiffany & Co. became the main seller, named the stone after its country and began promoting it in 1968. It’s also a December birthstone.
No set flower, so try zinnias
There isn’t a recognised flower for the twenty-fourth. Zinnias are a cheerful choice: in Victorian flower language they stood for lasting affection, which twenty-four years has well and truly earned.
Celebrating the 24th
Make a little time for the two of you
Go back to the pub where you had your first drink together, take the train somewhere neither of you has been, or spend a lazy Sunday with the old records and a long lunch. Twenty-four years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
Musical instruments are the modern gift, so make the day sound right. Put together a playlist with one song from every year you’ve been married, twenty-four in all, and play it on a long drive. Arguing over which song belongs to which year is half the fun.
End the day with a few lines on paper. A note gets kept long after the flowers have gone.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 24th means to others
Letters that capture twenty-four years
After twenty-four years you can finish each other’s sentences, which is handy, but it means some things never get said out loud. A letter fixes that in an evening. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about year twenty-four and its opal tradition.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Paul,
The modern gift for twenty-four years is a musical instrument. I nearly bought you one, then remembered the trombone in the garage you were going to learn in 2011, and the bagpipes before that.
This year you coached a team of eight-year-olds who never won a game and never stopped grinning, drove Liam to Brisbane for his first job, and sat with Dad at the hospital every Thursday without being asked.
Twenty-four years ago you promised to make me laugh every day. You’ve missed maybe three. I counted.
Happy anniversary. Leave the trombone where it is.
All my love,
Jo
Dear Annie,
We married in the Adelaide Hills in a heatwave, and the photographer fainted before the cake was cut. Your uncle took the rest of the photos, which is why half of them feature his thumb.
Twenty-four years later, I still look for you first in any room. This year you changed careers at fifty, ran your first half-marathon and somehow found time to sort out my mother’s tax return.
I don’t say it often enough, so here it is in ink: you’re the bravest person I know, and I’m proud to be married to you.
Happy anniversary. I’ve booked the Hills again, and a photographer who eats breakfast.
Love,
Matt
Dear Craig,
This is our fifth anniversary spent on opposite sides of a roster, so I’m putting it in writing, and you can read it in the donga with the air-con rattling.
Twenty-four years of you ringing at ten past seven every night, even from Port Hedland, even when there’s nothing to report but the weather. The kids used to roll their eyes. Last month Sophie told me she wants a marriage like ours.
When you’re home next week we’re going to do absolutely nothing, together, for three whole days. The lawn can wait.
Happy anniversary. Count down the days. I am.
Yours always,
Kerry
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the twenty-four-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
For their twenty-fourth anniversary, Amy Dawson suggested something her husband Scott was sure he’d hate: running a favourite trail loop at Taughannock over and over. They settled on twenty-four miles, running some laps and hiking the rest, and met friends along the way who turned out to be celebrating anniversaries that same day. Scott finished with a sandwich, a beer and the verdict that it was a delightful day.
About 120 to 100 million years ago, a short-necked reptile swam in a vast inland sea in what is now South Australia. Its bones, and the fish bones in its stomach, slowly turned to opal, and in 1987 opal miner Joe Vida found them in the wall of his mine at Coober Pedy. Named Eric after a Monty Python song, he was kept in Australia by a public ‘Save Eric’ appeal and now has a permanent home at the Australian Museum.
Sydney trainer G. Gorrie marked his 24th wedding anniversary in style when Miss Hua, a filly he trained, won the Two-Year-Old Stakes at Rosehill by six lengths, with Mrs Gorrie there to see it. Her owner was the American crooner and film star Bing Crosby, who had bought her in October, and she had now won both her starts in his colours. ‘We were especially keen to have a winner today,’ Mrs Gorrie said after the race.
24th anniversary FAQ
