A milestone worth celebrating
38th Anniversary Gifts
Hallmark’s theme for the thirty-eighth anniversary is luck, and modern gift lists suggest beryl or tourmaline.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of thirty-eight years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Luck, Beryl and Lucky Bay: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
A four-leaf clover, silver or real
Hallmark suggests a silver shamrock pendant or another lucky charm. If you’d rather find the real thing, a 2017 survey of 5.7 million clovers put the odds of a four-leaf one at about 5,000 to one, so pack a picnic and settle in.
A small flutter
Hallmark’s big-spend idea is a trip to a casino. Agree on a limit before you go, split the chips evenly, and whoever finishes ahead pays for dinner.
A few nights at Lucky Bay
Matthew Flinders named Lucky Bay, east of Esperance, in 1802, when his ship sheltered there from a summer storm. Western Australia’s parks service calls its sand arguably the whitest in Australia, and kangaroos bask on the beaches nearby. Book the campground early, as it’s popular.
Beryl in pink or gold
Most people know green beryl as emerald and blue beryl as aquamarine. Fewer know morganite, a soft pink beryl, or golden beryl, which runs from pale yellow to bright gold. Either makes a pretty and less expected pendant for the 38th.
New frames for the reading glasses
Early spectacles, made in Italy in the 1200s, used lenses of beryl or rock crystal because glass couldn’t yet be made clear enough. That’s why Germans still call glasses Brille. A smart new pair of frames is a cheeky, useful gift at thirty-eight.
A lucky cat for the window
For friends celebrating their 38th, Hallmark suggests a Japanese lucky cat figurine, said to draw good fortune and wealth into a home. Put it in their front window and see how long it takes them to notice.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate thirty-eight 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-eight 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 38th means
Why luck
for thirty-eight years?
Luck is Hallmark’s theme for a thirty-eighth wedding anniversary, and there’s no older gift competing with it. After thirty-eight years you can count up the lucky breaks, from the night you met to the times things could easily have gone the other way.
Why luck
Counting the lucky breaks
Ask any long-married couple how they met, and luck usually turns up early: a missed train, a friend’s spare ticket, a party one of you nearly didn’t go to. Thirty-eight years on, the fact that it all worked out still feels like a win.
Luck was part of weddings long before anniversaries had themes. In 1906, Sydney’s Sunday Sun promised that a groom with a tiny horseshoe in his pocket would always be lucky, and that a spider found on the wedding gown meant happiness to come.
Where it began
From pearls straight to rubies
The old anniversary lists had nothing for the thirty-eighth. In 1876 the Michigan Argus jumped from pearls at thirty to rubies at forty, and Brisbane’s Telegraph made the same leap in 1937.
Gifts for the in-between years came much later. Modern gift lists, collected by New Zealand’s Te Ara encyclopedia, give beryl or tourmaline for the thirty-eighth, and Te Ara notes that some of these later gifts look fairly recent. Hallmark chose a theme of luck instead.
Around the world
Jade, quicksilver and a half-year
Spanish lists call the thirty-eighth the bodas de jade, the jade wedding, and French lists the noces de mercure, after quicksilver. German, Dutch, Italian and Japanese lists don’t name it at all.
The Dutch and Austrians do mark the half-year just before it. At thirty-seven and a half years, Dutch lists give aluminium or gilded silver, and Austria has the Aluminiumhochzeit, the aluminium wedding.
38th anniversary symbols
Luck, beryl and myrtle
Luck, beryl or tourmaline
Neither has a long history. Hallmark gives the 38th a theme of luck, and modern gift lists give beryl or tourmaline, so a lucky charm and a gemstone are both fair game.
Beryl
GIA’s anniversary gemstone lists skip the 38th, so beryl, from the gift lists, is the natural choice. Its name goes back to an ancient Greek word for blue-green stones, and pure beryl is colourless, known as goshenite. It rates 7.5 to 8 on the Mohs scale.
Myrtle
There’s no official 38th anniversary flower, but myrtle suits a year about luck: in Victorian flower language it meant good luck and love in a marriage. A sprig from Queen Victoria’s wedding bouquet was planted, and sprigs from it have gone into royal wedding bouquets ever since.
Celebrating the 38th
Make a little time for the two of you
Take the scenic route to a town you’ve never visited, make a day of the footy or the theatre, or pull out the photo albums and write names and dates on the backs before nobody remembers who anyone is. Thirty-eight years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
Make it a lucky dinner. Each of you writes down the strokes of luck that shaped your thirty-eight years, from the night you met to the job offer that came through, and you take turns reading them out over dessert.
Then copy the luckiest one into a card. It’s a short note, and it says a great deal.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 38th means to others
Letters that capture thirty-eight years
Thirty-eight years in, you probably finish each other’s sentences, and now and then get them wrong. A letter lets you say the whole thing properly, from start to finish. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about luck and long marriages.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Col,
Apparently the thirty-eighth anniversary is all about luck. I told the girls at tennis and Bev said, ‘Well, Gail, you’ve had more than your share.’ For once I didn’t argue with her.
Remember Noosa, the summer after the wedding, when my ring went into the surf? You spent the whole next morning in the shallows with a borrowed sieve, and a man with a metal detector found it by lunchtime. You still tell people you found it.
Since then you’ve worn the same lucky socks to every State of Origin game, and Queensland has lost plenty of them. I’ve stopped pointing that out.
Happy anniversary, love. The luckiest thing I ever did was sit next to you at Karen’s twenty-first.
All my love,
Gail
Dear Maria,
In thirty-eight years I have never won a raffle, a meat tray or a chook wheel. I joined the Melbourne Cup sweep at work for twenty years and drew the scratching every time.
But in 1985 your friend’s Corolla broke down outside my uncle’s servo in Griffith, and you came in to use the phone. I think I used up all my luck in one go, and I’d make the same trade again tomorrow.
You’ve raised our three, kept both our mothers fed and laughing, and learned to like cricket, or at least to pretend very convincingly.
Happy anniversary. I’ve bought you a lottery ticket. If it wins, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, you’ve still got me.
Love,
Frank
To us, at thirty-eight,
One Saturday in 1986, each of us tossed a coin to decide whether to bother with Sharon’s engagement party in Bowral. We both got heads. We’ve told that story at so many dinners that the kids can recite it word for word.
What we know now: luck gets you in the door, and the rest is turning up. Taking turns with the early starts. Letting the other one have the last word, sometimes.
Here’s to the next one. We’re not leaving it to a coin.
Love,
Us
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the thirty-eight-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
In December 1971 Bert and Val Warren of Tewantin, near Noosa, celebrated their 38th wedding anniversary. They met when Bert went to Townsville to play cricket, a five-hour drive to cover 80 miles of rough, unsealed road, and by his own account he didn’t get a wicket that day. He had better luck off the field, where he met Val Custance of Townsville, the woman who became his wife.
When Jean Billington married in Victoria in 1958, her grandmother, Vera Myrtle Crocker, made her a lucky horseshoe from cardboard, wrapped in white ribbon and trimmed with lace and small pink and blue flowers. It also carried wax orange blossom saved from her mother’s and grandmother’s wedding dresses, so three generations of brides went into one small charm. It’s now in the Museums Victoria collection.
This Melbourne suburban paper rounded up wedding luck from across Europe. A cat sneezing the night before a wedding was a good omen in the Middle Ages, Derbyshire beekeepers told their bees about a wedding and decorated the hives, and in one part of Yorkshire the groom rubbed his elbow for luck whenever he met a male friend. Some medieval French brides even wore a ring made from a horseshoe nail. Short, odd and fun to read aloud.
38th anniversary FAQ
