A milestone worth celebrating
21st Anniversary Gifts
Brass is the traditional twenty-first anniversary gift, with nickel as the modern alternative.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of twenty-one years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Brass, Iolite and Opal: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
New brass for the front door
Choose brass house numbers, a door knocker or a letterbox plate together, and fit them on the day. It’s a present for the home you share, and you’ll both walk past it every day.
A night with the brass section
Book tickets for a big band, a jazz club or a brass band in the park. Twenty-one years of weddings and fiftieths should have taught you both to dance by now, and if not, this is your chance.
A jar of fifty-cent pieces
Australia’s silver-coloured coins are three parts copper to one part nickel. Start a jar on your anniversary, drop in every fifty-cent piece that comes your way, and spend the lot on dinner next year.
Plant an oak
For the oak wedding, plant a young oak in a big garden, at a community planting day or on a friend’s farm. Visit it every anniversary and see who has grown more.
Iolite, for less than tanzanite
Iolite is the twenty-first anniversary stone, and GIA notes it’s sometimes used in place of tanzanite because the colour is similar and the price is generally lower. Its colour is natural, too, as iolite isn’t usually treated.
An Australian opal
Opal is Australia’s national gemstone, and this country supplies 95 to 97 per cent of the world’s precious opal. A black opal from Lightning Ridge, the main source, makes a pendant that could only have come from here.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate twenty-one 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 twenty-one 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 21st means
Why brass
for twenty-one years?
Brass is the traditional gift for a twenty-first wedding anniversary, and nickel the modern one. Brass is the bright, gold-coloured metal of hinges, door handles and trumpets, hard-working and a little bit showy, which suits a marriage that has earned the right to celebrate.
Why brass
Copper, zinc and a bit of shine
Brass is copper mixed with zinc, and the recipe changes its colour: more copper makes it softer and more golden, more zinc makes it harder and more silvery. It resists corrosion and moves smoothly, so it’s used for locks, hinges, zips and taps, and its sound makes it the metal of horns.
Nickel, the modern gift, has the better story. German miners found an ore that looked like copper but wouldn’t give any, and blamed a mischievous sprite called Nickel. In 1751 the chemist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt got a white metal out of it instead, and kept the sprite’s name.
Where it began
Twenty-one and the key to the door
Twenty-first birthdays became big family events in the twentieth century. In New Zealand, Te Ara says, from the 1930s the parties revolved around ‘the key to the door’: the freedom to come and go without parents keeping watch.
Decorated keys were given as presents and appeared on cards and cakes, and sometimes all the guests signed a large gold key for the birthday person to keep. Australians now enrol and vote at 18, but twenty-one has kept its sense of occasion, and a marriage of twenty-one years has earned a key of its own.
Around the world
Opal, oak and fire
The French call the twenty-first the noces d’opale, the opal wedding, and Spanish lists give oak, the bodas de roble. In Victorian flower language oak stood for strength.
Hallmark gives the year a theme rather than a material: fire, the first of four themes it uses for the 21st to the 24th, followed by water, air and stone. German, Dutch and Japanese lists skip the twenty-first altogether.
21st anniversary symbols
Brass, iolite and a flower you choose
Brass and nickel
Te Ara’s list and Hallmark’s guide to the year agree: brass is the traditional twenty-first gift and nickel the modern one. The older British lists don’t name a twenty-first gift at all.
Iolite
Turn an iolite and you’ll see three different colours in three directions. Legend says Viking navigators used thin slices of it to find the sun through cloud, which makes it a good stone for whoever does the navigating in your house.
No set flower
No reliable list gives the twenty-first a flower. Choose the one from your wedding, or a favourite they’d never buy for themselves, and have a bunch delivered to work, where everyone will ask who it’s from.
Celebrating the 21st
Make a little time for the two of you
Book a table at the restaurant where you had your engagement dinner, take a long weekend somewhere neither of you has been, or spend an evening with the wedding video and a bottle of something good. Twenty-one years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
A twenty-first is the classic coming-of-age party, so give your marriage one. Ask the kids or your oldest friends for short speeches, put the old photos up on a wall, and make sure someone else does the dishes.
If a party isn’t your style, a page in your own handwriting does the same job more quietly.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 21st means to others
Letters that capture twenty-one years
Twenty-one years is long enough to have lived several lives together: newlyweds, tired parents, and now something new again. A letter is a good way to say thank you for all of them. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about the twenty-first year.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Gary,
Twenty-one years ago you stood at the front of a church in Wollongong in a suit borrowed from your brother, with the trousers three inches too short. You told everyone it was the fashion. It wasn’t.
This year our eldest moved out, and you were the one who cried in the car on the way home. You also learned to video-call your mother without filming the ceiling, which I know was hard for both of you.
After twenty-one years you still make my tea exactly right, and you still think you’re the better driver. One of those is true.
Happy anniversary. Here’s to the next part, just the two of us and a very spoilt dog.
All my love,
Jo
Dear Sophie,
I found our wedding invitations in the shed last week, still in the printer’s box, with February spelt wrong. We sent them anyway and blamed the printer.
Twenty-one years on, you’ve started a business, raised two teenagers who mostly speak to us, and nursed me through a broken ankle and a very bad attitude about it.
You’re the bravest person I know. You change jobs, move cities and try new things while I’m still reading the instructions.
Happy anniversary. The invitations are going in a frame, spelling and all.
Love,
Mark
Dear Gina,
I set out to write twenty-one reasons I love you and got stuck at nine because the kettle boiled. So here are the best ones.
You sing in the car and don’t care who hears. You remember everyone’s birthday, including the neighbours’ dog’s. You still hold my hand at the movies, especially the scary ones.
You make every house we live in feel like home within a week. And you married me, which says a lot about your patience.
The other twelve reasons come with dinner on Saturday. Wear the green dress.
Love,
Phil
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the twenty-one-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
The film star Fredric March and his wife and fellow actor, Florence Eldridge, were in London making Christopher Columbus when their twenty-first wedding anniversary came round, so they marked it with a night out: the last night of a West End play, then a charity ball at the Dorchester. The paper notes their custom of buying an anniversary present before leaving America, this time a landscape painting for their farm in Connecticut. For a special gift, Fredric also gave Florence a silver bracelet said to be more than 2,000 years old.
Lori has known her husband since she was sixteen, and her lessons are frank and funny. She knows how he likes his socks folded and where he hides his ‘special’ quarters, and once spent them on a rug that the family dog promptly ruined. Underneath is a serious point about shared history, after the two of them came through her parents’ divorce and their son’s four-year fight with leukaemia.
Hallmark’s guide to the twenty-first lists brass as the traditional gift and nickel as the modern one, then gets practical. Many of its ideas play on the number: twenty-one photos from every era of your relationship, a twenty-one-song playlist, or a twenty-one-stop scavenger hunt through the places that matter to you. It also has card lines and love-letter prompts for anyone stuck for words.
21st anniversary FAQ
