A milestone worth celebrating
3rd Anniversary Gifts
Leather is the traditional gift and crystal or glass the modern theme. White is the traditional third anniversary colour.
A genuine pearl white rose, finished with a lustrous glaze and 24 karat gold, is a lasting way to mark your first three years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Leather, Glass and Pearl: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
A journal you fill together
Choose a leather-bound journal and each write a page on every anniversary: where you’re living, what made you laugh, what you’re hoping for next. By your tenth, it will be the book you both reach for first.
A bag for the next trip
A leather overnight bag or a pair of passport wallets, embossed with your initials, for the trips you keep promising each other. Book the first one and tuck the details inside.
A leathercraft class for two
Spend an afternoon learning to cut and stitch leather, and make each other a card wallet or a key ring. The stitching won’t be perfect, and you’ll love it more for that.
Two glasses worth keeping
Glass is the modern gift, so choose a pair of hand-blown wine glasses or crystal tumblers etched with your wedding date. They’ll come out for every celebration from now on.
Colour in the window
Ask a local glass artist for a small stained-glass panel, perhaps based on the flowers in your wedding bouquet. Hang it where it catches the morning sun.
Pearls from Australian waters
Pearl is the 3rd anniversary gemstone, and by 1910 Broome was the biggest pearling centre in the world. Australia still grows large South Sea pearls, and a single one on a fine chain can be worn every day.
The pearl white glazed rose
A pearl white rose to celebrate three 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 three 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 3rd means
Why leather
for three years?
Leather is the traditional gift for a third wedding anniversary. It’s a working material, made for the shoes, bags and belts that go everywhere with you, which suits three years of shared everyday life.
Why leather
Made to be used
Leather starts as a raw hide and is made to last by tanning. The traditional method soaks the skin in liquors brewed from bark, leaves and twigs, then works oils into it so it can bend without cracking.
Museum conservators have noticed that leather left unused tends to go hard and inflexible. It stays soft by being worn, handled and looked after, which is a fair rule for a marriage too.
Where it began
Leather or straw, Sydney 1880
In March 1880, Sydney’s Australian Town and Country Journal printed a list of anniversary names for its readers, with ‘leather or straw’ for three years. The rule, it explained, was that every present had to be made of the anniversary’s material, and the party was usually organised by the couple’s friends.
A 1910 New York etiquette book went further. It suggested invitations on squares of real sheepskin parchment, card-game prizes made entirely of leather, and chocolate cake packed in tan leatherette boxes tied with gilt shoestrings.
Around the world
Leather, wheat and candy
In German-speaking countries the third is the Lederne Hochzeit, the leather wedding, though some regions call it the wheat wedding or the friendship wedding. Dutch lists give leather or wheat, and Spanish lists give cuero, leather.
France runs a year ahead: leather (cuir) marks the second anniversary there, and the third is the noces de froment, the wheat wedding. Japanese lists include a leather wedding, a grass wedding and a candy wedding, and one American home reference book from 1910 also gave candy for the third.
3rd anniversary symbols
Leather, pearls and sunflowers
Leather, crystal and glass
Leather is the traditional 3rd anniversary gift on both British and American lists, with crystal or glass as the modern choice. People have relied on it for a very long time: the oldest leather shoe yet found, from a cave in Armenia, is about 5,500 years old.
Pearl
A natural pearl grows around a tiny irritant inside a mollusc, with no human help at all. One famous natural pearl, La Peregrina, belonged to royalty and later to Elizabeth Taylor, and sold for US$11.8 million in 2011.
Sunflower
In Victorian flower language a dwarf sunflower meant adoration and a tall one meant haughtiness, so choose the shorter stems. Young sunflowers turn to follow the sun each day, then settle facing east once they open.
Celebrating the 3rd
Make a little time for the two of you
Drive out to the summer sunflower fields around Warwick and Allora on Queensland’s Southern Downs, take a picnic back to the place you got engaged, or cook the menu from your wedding at home. Three years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
For a theme night, go white and pearly: a white tablecloth, white flowers, a dozen oysters and a bottle of something cold.
Small gestures count as much as big ones. A note left in a coat pocket or a lunchbox is often the thing that gets kept.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 3rd means to others
Letters that capture three years
Three years in, the thank-you cards are long sent and you’ve settled who takes the bins out. It’s a good time to write down what you’ve learnt about each other. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about the third year.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Luke,
Three years ago you cried before I was halfway down the aisle, then told everyone it was hay fever. In March. Indoors.
Since then we’ve moved twice, adopted a greyhound who’s scared of the dark, and survived the bathroom renovation, which I maintain was mostly your idea. You’ve learnt to fold a fitted sheet. I’ve learnt that you need feeding before any serious conversation.
You’re still the first person I want to tell about everything. Thank you for making a home with me, even if it now smells faintly of greyhound.
Happy anniversary. The hay fever tissues are on me.
All my love,
Hannah
Dear Ellie,
You planned our honeymoon in Tasmania on a colour-coded spreadsheet, and the best day of it was the one that went wrong. The hire car got a flat outside Cradle Mountain, it started to sleet, and we sat in the open boot eating cold pies and laughing until we cried.
Three years on, that still sounds like us. Things go sideways, and somehow you make them fun.
This year you started night shifts and I finally learnt to cook, or at least to cook four things properly. You’ve never once complained about the fourth.
Happy anniversary. I’ve booked us a weekend away. There is no spreadsheet. Try to stay calm.
Love,
Josh
To us, at three,
Our wedding vows were lovely, but they were written by two people who had never shared a bathroom or driven to Mildura together in January. Three years on, here are some additions.
We promise to say ‘I’m hungry’ before it turns into an argument. To leave the last biscuit alone, or at least own up. To take turns choosing the film without sighing. To keep holding hands on the walk to the shops.
The old vows still stand, every word. Think of these as the fine print.
Love,
Us
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the three-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
Lyndsay and her husband planned a small family wedding for June 2020, then married that August with only their witnesses there. Writing a few days before their third anniversary, while the two of them were travelling around Europe, she looks back at the day, notes that leather is the gift for reaching three years, and sets out what has worked for them: talking, trust and respect. It ends with a short rhyming poem for her husband.
In October 1902, a Michigan newspaper reported on Mr and Mrs Elmer Stofflet’s third anniversary, their ‘leather wedding’, celebrated with an evening reception for about fifty guests at their home on Detroit Street. Mrs Stofflet wore her white wedding gown again, the rooms were filled with pink, purple and white asters, and most of the presents were made of leather. A short, cheerful snapshot of the old custom in action.
Woodrow Wilson married Edith Bolling Galt in December 1915, partway through his first term as President. For their third anniversary, which fell while he was in France for the peace talks after the First World War, he gave her a gold brooch set with a square aquamarine and ringed with eighty seed pearls and four diamonds. Fitting, since pearl is now the 3rd anniversary stone. The brooch is in the collection of the Woodrow Wilson House in Washington.
3rd anniversary FAQ
