A milestone worth celebrating
60th Anniversary Gifts
Diamond is both the traditional and the modern gift. Diamond white is the traditional sixtieth anniversary colour.
A genuine pearl white rose, finished with a lustrous glaze and 24 karat gold, is a lasting way to mark your first sixty years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Diamonds, Family and Sixty Years: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
Diamond earrings, at last
Hallmark’s big idea is a pair of diamond earrings, or, for someone who never had one, a diamond ring sixty years late. ‘Better late than never’ makes a perfectly good card.
A small diamond set in silver
For a smaller budget, Hallmark suggests silver jewellery with a small diamond accent. A tiny stone in a pendant or a pair of studs still sparkles every time they move.
A pink from Western Australia
Western Australia’s Argyle mine produced more than 90 per cent of the world’s pink diamonds before it closed in November 2020. Argyle pinks were always rare, so even a very small one is special; ask for its paperwork.
A night somewhere ‘diamond’
Hallmark suggests a stay at a hotel, motel or B&B with ‘diamond’ in its name. It’s a silly idea, which is exactly why it works: book it, and tell them only the name.
Let the family do the organising
In Germany the family, not the couple, usually hosts the diamond wedding. Borrow the custom: the guests of honour only have to turn up, and the grandchildren look after the cake.
Your story, recorded
Sit down with a grandchild and a phone and tell the story of how you met, each in your own words, with all the bits the other one always gets wrong. Someone will be very glad of it one day.
The pearl white glazed rose
A pearl white rose to celebrate sixty 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 sixty 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 60th means
Why diamond
for sixty years?
Diamond is both the traditional and the modern gift for a sixtieth wedding anniversary, the diamond wedding. It’s the hardest mineral on earth, made deep underground under great heat and pressure, and sixty years of marriage has known a little of both.
Why diamond
Made deep down, under pressure
GIA explains that diamonds formed about 160 kilometres below the surface, under high temperature and pressure, and only reached the places where they’re found when volcanic eruptions carried them up.
That makes diamond a fair symbol for sixty years together: formed slowly, tested by heat and pressure, and very hard to wear down. GIA calls it ‘an unchanging symbol of love and commitment’, and few couples have earned the description more.
Where it began
From seventy-five years to sixty
The diamond wedding used to come much later. In 1880 Sydney’s Australian Town and Country Journal listed it at seventy-five years, and Emily Post’s Etiquette still did in 1922.
Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 marked sixty years on the throne, and Debrett’s links that jubilee with diamonds becoming the gift for a sixtieth wedding anniversary. By 1937 Brisbane’s Telegraph listed diamond at sixty, and that is where it has stayed.
Around the world
Diamond weddings around the world
In Germany it’s the diamantene Hochzeit, and in 2019 the City of Vienna congratulated 681 couples on reaching theirs. In the Netherlands a couple married sixty years may find themselves in the local paper, with congratulations from the mayor or the council.
France has its noces de diamant, Italy its nozze di diamante, Spain its bodas de diamante, and in Japan it’s the diamond wedding too.
60th anniversary symbols
Diamonds, jubilees and white camellias
Diamond
Diamond is the 60th anniversary gift on American and British lists, traditional and modern alike. The jubilee names follow the same pattern: GIA calls the 25th the silver jubilee and the 50th the golden, and sixty years is a diamond jubilee.
Diamond
GIA lists diamond as the 60th anniversary gemstone. If there’s already a diamond in the family, such as an engagement ring, it can be reset, or joined by a second stone, rather than replaced.
None set, so try white camellias
No flower belongs to the sixtieth. If you’d like one to match diamond white, white camellias meant ‘you’re adorable’ in Victorian flower language, which is a lovely thing to say after sixty years.
Celebrating the 60th
Make a little time for the two of you
Have a long Sunday lunch with four generations at the table; take a slow drive past the church or registry office where it all began; or, if big crowds are tiring these days, have the family visit in small groups across the week so everyone gets a proper chat. Sixty years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
Diamond white is the colour for the sixtieth, so set the table in white: a white cloth, white flowers, candles and the good glasses that usually only come out at Christmas. Ask everyone to wear something white or silver for the family photo.
At the end of the day, a few lines from one of you to the other, read aloud or kept private, will matter more than the cake.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 60th means to others
Letters that capture sixty years
Sixty years is a lifetime of shared jokes, borrowed reading glasses and finishing each other’s sentences, sometimes wrongly. Putting a little of it on paper is a gift the whole family will treasure later. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about diamond weddings.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Les,
In 1966 you borrowed your brother’s Holden for the honeymoon and ran out of petrol outside Gundagai. We sat on the bonnet eating wedding cake until a truckie took pity on us. I think of it every time we drive past the Dog on the Tuckerbox.
Sixty years, five children, eleven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren later, you still check the petrol twice before every trip. You still hold the door. You still call me ‘girl’, which nobody else would get away with.
My knees aren’t what they were, and your hearing is selective at best, but I’d still sit on a bonnet with you anywhere.
Happy diamond anniversary, love.
All my love,
Val
Dear Nancy,
In 1964 you walked into the Saturday dance at the Masonic hall in a yellow dress, and I trod on your foot within a minute. You married me anyway, two years later, which I still count as the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.
We’ve had the good years and the lean ones, the drought on the farm and the move into town. You kept the books, kept the peace and kept me going. The kids say you were the boss. They’re right, and I never minded.
These days we walk to the corner shop and back and call it an outing. I don’t need anything grander. I’ve had sixty years of the best company there is.
Happy anniversary, my darling. I promise to mind your feet.
Love always,
Bill
Dear Mum and Dad,
We worked it out: you’ve been married for 21,915 days. Dad says it feels like a week. Mum says it feels like every one of them. We think you’re both joking.
You taught us to say thank you to the bus driver, change a tyre, make a white sauce without lumps and stop sulking before dinner. Mostly you taught us by example, by the way you still look after each other.
Thank you for sixty years of Sunday roasts, school runs, borrowed cars and sensible advice. We’re all coming for lunch, and nobody is letting you wash up.
With love from all of us,
Sue, Michael and Kate
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the sixty-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
More than 150 people crowded into the Yarramalong Hall, near Wyong, for George and Matilda Palmer’s diamond wedding, and a telegram from the Governor-General was read among the congratulations. Their bridesmaid of sixty years earlier sat at the main table, a granddaughter made and iced the cake, and George handed his daughter-in-law a pair of cut-glass decanters that her own grandmother had given the couple as a wedding present. Then everyone danced until midnight.
For their diamond wedding in November 2007, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip went back to Broadlands in Hampshire to recreate a honeymoon photograph taken there sixty years earlier, in almost identical clothes and the same double strand of pearls. HELLO! reported it was the first diamond wedding anniversary celebrated by a reigning monarch, and described the family dinner that followed, with white orchids chosen to echo the 1947 bridal bouquet.
Len and Elaine Jarrett met at Port Macquarie, married at Auburn Anglican Church in February 1957, and spent 42 years in the Cessnock area working side by side in post offices and general stores. At 91, Len was still playing tennis every Friday. For their sixtieth, their three daughters took them back to Port Macquarie, where it all started, and the couple’s advice was simple: never end the day without patching up an argument.
60th anniversary FAQ
