A milestone worth celebrating
17th Anniversary Gifts
Furniture is both the traditional and the modern seventeenth anniversary gift.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of seventeen years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Furniture, Timber and Watches: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
A find to fix up together
Hallmark suggests hunting for a piece at a thrift or secondhand shop. Pick one with good bones, a chair or a small cabinet, and spend a few weekends sanding and oiling it together.
A piece made for the two of you
Commission a local furniture maker to build a side table, a desk or a bookshelf, as Hallmark suggests. Ask them to mark your initials and wedding date somewhere only you two will know to look.
A piece of red cedar
Australian red cedar was so prized by early settlers that they called it red gold, and it was logged so heavily that the species is now commercially extinct. An old cedar chest of drawers or table from an antique dealer carries a piece of that history.
Two chairs and a sunset
Hallmark’s budget idea is a camping chair and a trip to a nearby pond or lake to watch the sun set. Buy a matching pair, keep them in the boot, and use them often.
A watch, engraved on the back
Te Ara lists watches as the other 17th anniversary gift. GIA notes that men’s wristwatches began in the military, and that Sir Edmund Hillary wore a Rolex when he reached the top of Everest in 1953.
A new mattress
Hallmark lists it as a splurge, and it is the least romantic gift on this page until the first night you sleep on it. It will be used every single night, which is more than most presents can say.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate seventeen 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 seventeen 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 17th means
Why furniture
for seventeen years?
Furniture is the gift for a seventeenth wedding anniversary. By now you know exactly how you live: which chair gets the afternoon sun, where the school bags land, and how many people really fit around the table.
Why furniture
The things you live with
Most couples start out with hand-me-downs: a parent’s old couch, a table from a garage sale, a bookcase held up by optimism. Seventeen years later, you can finally choose a piece for the way you actually live.
Good furniture also earns its marks. A solid table collects scratches, cup rings and the odd felt-pen drawing, and each one is a small record of the family that sat around it.
Where it began
A newer anniversary
Victorian anniversary lists didn’t include a seventeenth, and neither did Emily Post’s Etiquette of 1922, which went from crystal at fifteen to china at twenty. The gap closed in 1937, when American jewellers published a list with a gift for every year up to the twentieth.
The lists still don’t quite agree on what that gift is. Hallmark says furniture, while New Zealand’s Te Ara offers furniture or watches.
Around the world
A year for flowers
Outside the English-speaking world, the seventeenth is about flowers rather than furniture. In France it is the noces de rose, the rose wedding, and the Dutch list gives roos, rose, as well.
Spain chooses a different flower: the seventeenth there is named for alhelí, the fragrant flower florists call stock. German, Italian and Japanese lists don’t name the seventeenth at all.
17th anniversary symbols
Furniture, watches and a flower to choose
Furniture
Furniture is the 17th gift on both of Hallmark’s lists, traditional and modern. Choose something you’ll both use every day: a reading chair, a hall table, a proper bed frame.
Watches, not a stone
There’s no set gemstone for the 17th, and GIA’s anniversary list puts wristwatches in its place. GIA also points out that in the mid-1700s nurses wore watches on their wrists, probably to keep them out of children’s reach.
No set flower
None of the English-language lists gives a flower for the seventeenth. Choose one from your wedding bouquet, or whatever was flowering in the garden the week you married.
Celebrating the 17th
Make a little time for the two of you
Go back to where you had your first date, book a long lunch somewhere with a view, or pack the car for a night away with no plan at all. Seventeen years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
Hallmark suggests turning a furniture-shopping day into an occasion, with a celebratory brunch first. Sit on every sofa in the shop, argue happily about colours, and walk out with nothing if nothing feels right.
Before the day is over, leave a note where only they will find it: under the lid of the coffee tin, or in the drawer of their bedside table.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 17th means to others
Letters that capture seventeen years
Seventeen years in, you probably have a teenager, a mortgage or both, and very few quiet evenings. A letter makes room for the things that get crowded out. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about year seventeen.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Chris,
The seventeenth is the furniture anniversary, which is handy, because you have been about to fix the wobbly kitchen chair since 2012. I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying.
This year you built Mia a desk for Year 11 out of the old bunk beds, and she pretended not to love it for nearly two days. You took Dad fishing every second Saturday after his knee operation, and let him win the argument about the bait.
You still sing in the car as if nobody can hear you. We can. We all can. Please don’t stop.
Happy anniversary. I’ll hold the chair if you bring the glue.
All my love,
Steph
Dear Nina,
Seventeen years ago we couldn’t afford a honeymoon, so we drove to Port Macquarie in my brother’s ute with a mattress in the back. It rained for four days. You read three books and called it the best week of your life.
We’ve had better holidays since, but I still think about that ute.
Thank you for this year: for keeping us all afloat when my work went sideways, for teaching Jack to make a decent omelette, and for laughing at me exactly when I needed it.
Happy anniversary. I’ve borrowed the ute again. Bring a book.
Love,
Adam
To us,
We bought this couch with our first tax refund, seventeen years ago. It has survived two moves, three babies, one Labrador and the great spaghetti incident of 2015. The cushions no longer match and one leg is propped up with coasters.
We could replace it. We keep deciding not to. It’s where we watched the grand final and the election results, did the 3am feeds and made up after every argument worth having.
So here’s to the couch, and to the two of us: a bit saggy, very comfortable, and staying put.
Love,
Us, still on the couch
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the seventeen-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
Author Bryce Moore looked up the seventeenth anniversary, found it was furniture, and noted that the porch swings he and his wife, Denisa, had ordered for their renovation were arriving that very day. Behind the joke is a short, honest piece about how easy it is to take a long marriage for granted, and how different life looks now from their early years of study and basement flats. He also takes the last word in a bathroom-mirror argument.
Mr and Mrs Rickard-Bell of Spencer Street, Bunbury, hadn’t planned a party for their seventeenth anniversary. It happened on the spur of the moment, after Mr Rickard-Bell ran into his best man, whom he hadn’t seen for many years, and one guest called the evening an ‘unqualified success’. The note sits in a social column full of holidays, engagements and visitors, a small snapshot of country-town life in 1948.
Two walnut chests were made for Dominica Tripodi as glory boxes, from trees on her family’s olive farm near Sinopoli in Calabria. She filled one with linen before her wedding in 1946, brought both to Australia when she migrated, and filled this one over the years for her daughter, Carmel, who married in Melbourne in 1978. Museums Victoria calls glory boxes a significant rite of passage for many women of that era.
17th anniversary FAQ
