A milestone worth celebrating
40th Anniversary Gifts
Ruby is both the traditional and the modern gift. Ruby red is the traditional fortieth anniversary colour.
A genuine ruby red rose, finished with a lustrous glaze and 24 karat gold, is a lasting way to mark your first forty years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Rubies, Ruby Glass and the Red Centre: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
A ruby, with the details in writing
GIA’s advice for buying a ruby is short: assume it has been heated, get any treatment in writing, and ask for a lab report if you’re unsure. Glass-filled rubies are worth less than heated ones, so ask before you buy.
Glasses coloured with gold
Cranberry glass, also called gold ruby glass, gets its colour from gold added to the molten glass, and the Victorians made plenty of it. Find a pair at an antiques market and use them for the toast Hallmark suggests: red wine in ruby glass.
A taste of the year you married
Seppeltsfield in the Barossa has been ageing tawny in its Centennial Cellar since 1878, and its cellar tour includes a taste from your birth year, straight from the barrel. Ask whether they’ll pour your wedding year instead.
A box of ruby chocolate
Ruby chocolate was launched in 2017 by the Belgian-Swiss company Barry Callebaut. It’s naturally pink, with no added colouring and a tart, berry-like taste, and it makes a cheerful gift from the grandchildren.
The Red Centre at sunset
Uluru glows red at dawn and sunset, thanks to the iron oxide in its sandstone. Forty years is a fair excuse to finally see it together, from a pair of camp chairs with something cold in hand.
Forty years in forty pages
This one is for the children to organise. Ask family and old friends to each take one year of the marriage and write down a memory from it, then bind the pages into a book.
The ruby red glazed rose
A ruby red rose to celebrate forty years together
A genuine ruby red 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 forty 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 40th means
Why ruby
for forty years?
Ruby is the gift for a fortieth wedding anniversary, on traditional and modern lists alike. A hard, deep red stone suits a marriage that has kept its warmth through four decades.
Why ruby
A fire that never went out
Ruby takes its name from ruber, the Latin for red. GIA notes that its glow once made people think of a flame that could never be put out, which is about right for a marriage still going strong at forty.
In medieval Europe, people wore rubies to bring health, wealth, wisdom and success in love. Forty years in, you can decide for yourselves how many of the four you’ve collected.
Where it began
Forty years, rubies and a party
The ruby has belonged to the fortieth for a long time. A list in the Michigan Argus in 1876 noted that ‘at the fortieth comes the rubies’, and Brisbane’s Telegraph gave ruby for the fortieth in 1937, while admitting that only silver and golden weddings were usually celebrated.
In 1951 the Shepparton Advertiser showed how it was done. When Mr and Mrs H. Turner reached forty years, their daughter threw a ruby wedding party for 56 guests, with dancing, a decorated cake and a toast from their son-in-law to ‘the bride and groom’.
Around the world
Ruby, nearly everywhere
Ruby is one of the few anniversary gifts that most countries share. Spain has its bodas de rubí, Italy its nozze di rubino and Germany its Rubinhochzeit, and Japan calls the fortieth the ruby wedding too.
France is the odd one out: there the fortieth is the noces d’émeraude, the emerald wedding, and rubies come at thirty-five. German lists also offer emerald and garnet weddings, and Dutch lists give ruby, emerald or doublé, which is rolled gold.
40th anniversary symbols
Ruby, ruby red and gladioli
Ruby, on every list
Ruby is the 40th anniversary gift on Emily Post’s and Hallmark’s lists in America and on Debrett’s in Britain. New Zealand’s Te Ara encyclopedia gives it as an example of a gift widely accepted as traditional, and the modern lists keep it too.
Ruby
GIA traces Burma’s rubies back to at least AD 600, and gem dealers call the most prized shade ‘pigeon blood red’. For the 50th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz, jeweller Harry Winston made a real pair of ruby slippers, set with 4,600 rubies.
Gladiolus
Its name is Latin for a little sword, and in Victorian flower language the gladiolus stood for strength, integrity and victory. Australians know it best as Dame Edna Everage’s ‘gladdies’, worn by 1000 dancing Dames at the closing ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.
Celebrating the 40th
Make a little time for the two of you
Go back to the church or hall where you married and take a slow walk around it, drive the coast road you used to take every summer, or spend a whole evening out without once checking on the grandchildren. Forty years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
If there’s a ruby wedding party, give it one simple rule: everyone wears something red. Then stand in your wedding-photo pose, in the same spot if you can, and frame the old and new photos side by side.
And somewhere in the day, tuck a card into their coat pocket or the glovebox. After forty years, finding a note by surprise is still a treat.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 40th means to others
Letters that capture forty years
Forty years in, you’ve heard every one of each other’s stories, and you still laugh at most of them. A letter is the place to say what usually goes unsaid. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about the ruby wedding.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Phil,
Forty years ago you waited at the front of St Michael’s in Wollongong in a grey suit, a pencil moustache and enough hair gel to hold up a tent. I’ve seen the photos. So have the grandchildren, and they have questions.
Since then you’ve built two pergolas, coached three junior soccer teams, and sat up through every one of Mum’s hospital nights so I could sleep. You never once said it was too much.
Retirement has given you new hobbies, mainly rearranging my pantry by use-by date and telling the neighbours about your tomatoes. I’ve decided to find it charming.
Happy ruby anniversary. Forty years on, you’re still the first person I want to tell everything to.
All my love,
Lorraine
Dear Anne,
The kids tell me forty is the ruby anniversary, so I went to a jeweller. He spent twenty minutes explaining that nearly every ruby has been heated. I told him so has our kitchen, ever since you discovered Thai curries.
Forty years ago I couldn’t boil an egg, couldn’t dance and couldn’t keep a job longer than a footy season. You fixed two of those, and you’ve stopped asking me to dance at weddings, which is its own kind of love.
When the business nearly went under in ’91, you did the books at the kitchen table every night for a year. I’ve never thanked you properly for that. Thank you.
Happy fortieth. I’ve booked the cottage at Bicheno for a week. All you need to pack is a book.
Love,
Robert
To us, at forty,
We’re writing this at a fold-out table somewhere past Kununurra, with the radio on and a mozzie coil going. Forty years ago we honeymooned in a borrowed tent at Jervis Bay and swore we’d do the big lap one day. It took a while.
What we’ve learned since: never reverse a caravan while the other one directs. Always ring the kids on Sunday. Hold hands at the lookout, even when there’s a busload of tourists.
What we promise for the next ten years: one more lap, a dance at every grandchild’s wedding, and no more arguments about the map. Well, fewer.
Happy ruby wedding to the two of us.
Love,
Us, somewhere in the Kimberley
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the forty-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
Deb and her husband, from Tumbarumba in southern New South Wales, spent their 40th anniversary in London, at the end of two months with their daughter and a new granddaughter who was born at 25 weeks and is now thriving. Back home, bushfires had threatened their town three times that summer, and the house was still standing. It’s a cheerful post about an anniversary they’ll never forget, and she’s firm that she doesn’t feel old.
Food blogger Kathleen Bauer wrote this for her fortieth anniversary with Dave, a newspaper reporter so quiet that acquaintances asked whether he ever talked. The first time he spoke to her he offered her a kitten; the second time he asked her to guess where he was from, and she named the state farthest from Oregon she could think of, which was right. Evenings printing her travel photos in the paper’s darkroom followed, then a first Christmas present of a large axe for her tiny fireplace. Forty years on he bakes sourdough and answers every new venture of hers with ‘Have fun’.
This 1910 etiquette book suggests invitations in dark red ink and candles under crimson shades, then describes a party for Mr and Mrs Hall, who had grandchildren old enough to marry and thought a fuss rather frivolous. Their family hung ruby-coloured lamps through the house, built a grapevine arbour in the back parlour and saved the last dance for the couple. The menu, from boned turkey to blood oranges, is worth a look on its own.
40th anniversary FAQ
