A milestone worth celebrating
44th Anniversary Gifts
Hallmark’s theme for the forty-fourth anniversary is electronics, with groceries as a modern alternative.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of forty-four years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Electronics, Groceries and Stars: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
A photo frame that’s already full
Hallmark suggests a digital photo frame loaded with family pictures before it’s unwrapped. Ask the children and grandchildren to send their favourites, and add a few of the two of you that nobody has seen in years.
Your wedding songs, in good headphones
Hallmark’s budget idea is a music player with headphones. Load it with every song from your wedding reception, plus the ones you still dance to in the kitchen when nobody’s watching.
A hamper of the good stuff
Groceries is the modern 44th anniversary gift on an older American list. Fill a hamper with things you’d never buy for yourselves: the expensive cheese, the proper coffee, the jar of something from the deli you always walk past.
A night under dark skies
For the German star wedding, head to Warrumbungle National Park near Coonabarabran, Australia’s first Dark Sky Park. The visitor centre sells star charts, and the park’s campgrounds put you right under some of the clearest skies in the state.
Topaz, in their colour
The French call the 44th the topaz wedding, and GIA says topaz has an exceptionally wide colour range, from blue and pink to orange and the rare reddish ‘imperial’ shades. Choose the one that suits them for earrings or a ring.
Forty-four love sonnets
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote exactly forty-four love sonnets, published in 1850 as Sonnets from the Portuguese, and it was her husband, Robert, who talked her into publishing them. A good copy with a bookmark in your favourite is a fine fit for a 44th.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate forty-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 forty-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 44th means
Why electronics
for forty-four years?
Electronics is Hallmark’s theme for a forty-fourth wedding anniversary. It’s a modern choice for a long marriage, and a useful one: the right gadget keeps you close to the family your marriage has grown.
Why electronics
Upgrades, together
A couple married forty-four years has upgraded a great deal together: the television, the phone, the car radio, possibly a hip. Hallmark’s theme is a cheerful nod to the fact that the right gadget can make the years ahead easier and a lot more fun.
Hallmark’s suggestions run from headphones and a music player to the newest tablet, with one clever condition attached: get a grandchild, niece or nephew to teach them how to use it. The lesson is half the present.
Where it began
Groceries, according to the library
The old anniversary lists never reached the forty-fourth. A 1910 guide to weddings and anniversaries named the ruby wedding at forty and then nothing until the golden wedding at fifty.
In 1997, librarians at the Chicago Public Library compiled a gift for every year from reference books, and for the forty-fourth they put down groceries. It sounds unromantic until you count how many shopping lists you’ve written for each other since the wedding.
Around the world
Stars, topaz and turquoise
German lists call the forty-fourth the Sternenhochzeit, the star wedding. German wedding writers admit the meaning isn’t well documented, but they like to think of the stars as the light that shines through even the darkest night.
In France the forty-fourth is the noces de topaze, the topaz wedding, and Spanish lists give turquoise. The Dutch, Italian and Japanese lists don’t name it at all.
44th anniversary symbols
Electronics, topaz and stars
Electronics and groceries
Electronics is Hallmark’s theme and groceries the Chicago Public Library’s modern gift, which makes the forty-fourth one of the most practical years on the list. A new coffee machine and a bag of good beans covers both.
None set, though France says topaz
No English-language list sets a stone for the 44th, but topaz may bring back the early years. GIA gives blue topaz as the gem of the fourth anniversary, and precious topaz is the November birthstone, with blue topaz for December.
No set flower
No reliable list names a flower for the 44th. In keeping with the German star wedding, look for star-shaped flowers, such as a star jasmine to train along the back fence, where you’ll smell it every evening it flowers.
Celebrating the 44th
Make a little time for the two of you
Show each other the one thing on your phones you’ve been pretending to understand, book a table somewhere quiet enough to hear each other, or put on the records you danced to in your twenties. Forty-four years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
Make a game of the groceries gift. Each of you writes a shopping list of the other’s favourite foods, does the shop in secret, and cooks the other a surprise dinner. Compare notes on who knows whom better.
And if you’re quicker on a keyboard than with a pen, an email counts too, as long as you mean every word.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 44th means to others
Letters that capture forty-four years
Forty-four years in, you’ve done most things together at least once, from the tax returns to the school runs to the long drives home with everyone asleep in the back. A letter is a good way to mark the parts that mattered. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about year forty-four.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Kevin,
Forty-four years ago you told my father you had ‘prospects’. He looked at your car and said nothing, which was generous of him.
Since then you’ve fixed every appliance in this house, usually with the wrong tool, and taught yourself to video-call so you could read bedtime stories to the grandkids in Darwin. They think you’re hilarious. So do I.
I’m told this is the electronics anniversary, so there’s a new phone in this box. Lily has promised to show you how it works. Please let her.
All my love,
Dianne
Dear Anne,
You did the shopping for forty-four years, give or take a few weeks after each baby, and I never once wondered how you knew we were out of milk.
Since I retired and took it over, I’ve bought eleven jars of cumin, forgotten the bread three times and been told off at the deli counter for dithering. I now understand you were running a small, efficient business all along.
I’m told the modern gift for forty-four years is groceries, so the fridge is full and dinner is my job tonight. It’s spaghetti. It’s always spaghetti.
Love,
Terry
To us,
We married on the hottest day of the year, in a church with no air conditioning, and the photographer fainted during the vows. Forty-four years later we still check every wedding invitation for the word ‘outdoor’.
We’ve lived in four towns and one very small flat, raised three kids, said goodbye to both sets of parents and become grandparents five times over. We’ve been good at some of it and lucky with the rest.
Tonight we’ll sit in the backyard with a blanket and see who can find the Southern Cross first. Loser does the dishes.
Love,
Us
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the forty-four-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
In February 1950, relatives and friends ‘invaded’ the Beaudesert home of Mr and Mrs T. Jurd to mark their forty-fourth anniversary, and found Mr Jurd already in bed. Once he was up, there were presents (a black kid handbag for her and, from a granddaughter, a shaving brush for him), a toast, cards until supper and a homemade wedding cake. A lovely snapshot of a country celebration.
Groceries are the traditional gift for a 44th anniversary, and Becky and Ed Osowski have spent their working lives among them. Becky was hired as a 16-year-old cashier at Martin’s Super Markets in Indiana in 1970, on a register with a crank on the side, and met her co-worker Ed in the aisles; they married in the mid-1970s. By 2020 she had never worked anywhere else, Ed had become director of produce, buying tomatoes and citrus as far away as Spain, and the couple were retiring with a combined 100 years of service and plans to travel together.
Written for his forty-fourth anniversary with his wife, Barbara, career coach Marty Nemko’s list is frank about a marriage he calls ‘not made in heaven’ that has worked anyway. They agreed to stop rehashing their one long-running disagreement, mention an irritation once and then let it go, and don’t hold grudges. Some of their choices, such as keeping separate homes, won’t suit everyone, which is rather the point.
44th anniversary FAQ
