A milestone worth celebrating
37th Anniversary Gifts
Hallmark’s theme for the thirty-seventh anniversary is books, and New Zealand’s national encyclopedia lists alabaster as the gift.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of thirty-seven years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Books, Alabaster and Paper: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
A first edition of a favourite
Hallmark’s splurge idea is a signed or first edition of their favourite book. A specialist dealer can help you find one, and you can tuck the receipt and any notes on its history inside the cover.
An audiobook for the long drive
Pick a romantic audiobook together to listen to in the car, as Hallmark suggests. Save it for the next long drive to see the grandchildren, and allow one chapter between petrol stops.
A book of your thirty-seven years
Turn the photos, letters and ticket stubs from your marriage into a printed book, one page for every year. Leave the last few pages blank on purpose.
A book from the year you married
Track down a novel that came out in your wedding year, perhaps one you both read at the time. Write a few lines on the flyleaf about who you were then and where you lived.
An alabaster lamp
Calcite alabaster spreads light evenly, which is why it is often carved into lampshades and light fittings. A small alabaster lamp by the reading chair is a gift that gets used every evening.
A box of letters, started now
Buy a good box and a pad of heavy writing paper, write the first letter yourself, and agree to add one each every anniversary from now on. By your fiftieth the box will be full.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate thirty-seven 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 thirty-seven 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 37th means
Why books and alabaster
for thirty-seven years?
Books are Hallmark’s theme for a thirty-seventh wedding anniversary, and alabaster is the gift on the longer anniversary table kept by New Zealand’s national encyclopedia. After thirty-seven years you have a long story behind you, and alabaster, a soft stone that lets the light through, suits a marriage that has softened at the edges.
Why books and alabaster
A long story, and a stone that lets the light in
Most long marriages have a shelf of shared books: the cookbook that falls open at the same page, the road atlas with notes in the margins, the picture books read to the children and now to theirs. A book for a thirty-seventh anniversary adds one more to the shelf, chosen for this year.
Alabaster is a soft stone, and cut into thin sheets it lets enough light through to be used for small windows. Thirty-seven years tends to do something similar to a couple: a little softer, and much easier to read.
Where it began
From Tutankhamun to Nottingham
Alabaster has been carved for thousands of years. Tutankhamun’s tomb held a cosmetics jar made of Egyptian alabaster, and the Etruscans carved it in the district around Volterra, where it is still worked today.
In the 1300s and 1400s, carving alabaster altarpieces was a valuable trade in Nottingham and a major English export. As an anniversary gift it is far newer: the anniversary lists printed in Sydney in 1880 and Brisbane in 1937 left the thirty-seventh blank.
Around the world
Paper, stone and aluminium
In France the thirty-seventh is the noces de papier, the paper wedding, and Spanish lists give piedra, stone. Italian and Japanese lists skip the year.
German and Dutch lists wait another six months and mark thirty-seven and a half years as the aluminium wedding, exactly half of seventy-five. The Dutch also offer gilded silver.
37th anniversary symbols
Books, alabaster and paper
Books
Hallmark’s guide to the thirty-seventh runs from audiobooks to e-readers. Its best tip is for friends buying for another couple: give them each a book they’ll enjoy with a romantic bookmark, and steer clear of anything with a gloomy title.
Alabaster
The name covers two minerals that look alike: gypsum, soft enough to scratch with a fingernail, and calcite, which resists a nail but can be cut with a knife. The English word came to us through Old French, from a Greek name for an alabaster vase.
Paper
Paper is the first anniversary gift on Emily Post’s list, so in France the thirty-seventh brings you back to where you started, thirty-six years older and much better at it.
Celebrating the 37th
Make a little time for the two of you
Spend an afternoon in a big second-hand bookshop choosing a book for each other with a twenty-dollar limit, go to a writers’ festival session together, or reread the first book you both loved and compare notes over dinner. Thirty-seven years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
For a book anniversary, hold a family library night. Everyone brings the book they’d most like the two of you to read next and has two minutes to sell it.
Then write a few lines of your own and tuck them into the book they’re reading now. They’ll find it at exactly the right page.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 37th means to others
Letters that capture thirty-seven years
After thirty-seven years you know each other like a favourite book: where the funny bits are, which pages are dog-eared, which chapters still make you laugh. A letter adds a new page, and it doesn’t need to be long. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about thirty-seven years, alabaster and reading together.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Alan,
Apparently the thirty-seventh is the book anniversary. You’ll be thrilled, since there isn’t a flat surface in this house without one of your books on it, open and face down, which you know breaks the spine and I know you’ll never stop doing.
This year you read to Ollie every night he stayed over, doing all the voices, including a dragon with a Scottish accent for reasons nobody understands. He now won’t let anyone else read that book.
Thirty-seven years ago you read your vows off a serviette because you’d left the card in the car. I still have the serviette. It’s pressed in the back of the wedding album.
Happy anniversary. I’ve bought you a bookmark. Please use it.
All my love,
Jenny
Dear Carol,
When we married I owned four books, and one of them was a street directory. You moved in with eleven boxes of novels and a bookcase I had to carry up three flights of stairs in Newtown.
Thirty-seven years later I’ve read more than I ever thought I would, mostly because you leave books on my side of the bed with a note saying ‘You’ll like this one.’ You’re nearly always right. The one about whales was a stretch.
You’ve read me pretty well too: when to talk, when to leave me to the cricket, and when I need a walk more than an argument.
Happy anniversary. The new bookcase is in the garage. I’ll carry it in myself, although these days it might take both of us.
Love,
Steve
Dear Rob,
For thirty-six years you left for work at 6.40 and came home at 5.30, and I had the house to myself all day. This year you retired, and I’ve learned more about you than in the previous three decades. You talk to the radio, for one. You also have opinions about how I stack the dishwasher.
I’ve learned the good things too. You make a proper breakfast. You walk me to the bus for choir as if we’re seventeen. You bring me the paper with the crossword already started in pen, which is either love or sabotage.
Thirty-seven years married, and we’re only now getting to know each other on a Tuesday afternoon. It turns out I like you very much.
Happy anniversary. Same two people, new chapter.
Yours,
Deb
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the thirty-seven-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
Jane and Mike Deegan married at 19 and 21, and this short anniversary letter marks thirty-seven years together. Their son arrived when they were 38 and 40, and she runs through the jobs, homes, moves, illnesses and losses they have come through side by side. Brief, plain-spoken and full of feeling.
In 1942 a reader’s aunt wrote to The Weekly suggesting that girls write to lonely soldiers, and a soldier in the Middle East wrote back. The aunt passed his letter on to a neighbour’s daughter, and the writer, then 17 and ‘romance mad’, asked her friend to find out whether he had a mate; soon she was writing to a young soldier of her own. She finally met him while he was passing through Brisbane, they married 18 months later, and in 1981 they were celebrating 37 years together.
This newspaper feature meets couples who read books aloud to each other. William and Joan Hunt of Toronto began in their first year of marriage with 84 Charing Cross Road and had shared at least 50 books since, and William, once a doubter, now compares it to watching a sunset with someone. Another couple had been reading aloud nearly every other night for twelve years.
37th anniversary FAQ
