A milestone worth celebrating
33rd Anniversary Gifts
Hallmark’s theme for the thirty-third anniversary is iron, with amethyst as the modern alternative.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of thirty-three years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Iron, Amethyst and Vinyl: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
A cast-iron pan, and a cookbook
Hallmark’s gift for another couple is a cast-iron pan with a book on cast-iron cooking, and it works just as well between the two of you. Cast iron holds its heat for a long time, and pans made in the 1800s are still in daily use.
Candles in wrought iron
Another Hallmark idea: a wrought-iron holder for several pillar candles, for the dining table or an empty fireplace. Light them on the anniversary and on any ordinary night that needs it.
A new set of irons
Hallmark suggests golf clubs for the golfer, and the pun is too good to waste. Wrap a single new iron, with a card promising the rest of the set, or a round together at a course you’ve always wanted to play.
Amethyst for every day
Amethyst is the modern 33rd gift. It rates 7 on the hardness scale, tough enough for a ring or pendant worn daily, and it’s also the birthstone for February, a bonus if either of you was born that month.
Your wedding song at 33⅓
An LP spins at 33⅓ revolutions a minute, the format Columbia Records launched in 1948. Find the album with your wedding song on it, on vinyl, and play a side together; at about 25 minutes, it’s long enough for a dance and a glass of something.
A garlic dinner, four months on
German even has a name for thirty-three and a third years: the Knoblauchhochzeit, or garlic wedding, recorded by the Society for the German Language in 1992. It falls four months after your 33rd, a fine excuse for a second, very garlicky dinner.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate thirty-three 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 thirty-three 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 33rd means
Why iron
for thirty-three years?
Iron is Hallmark’s gift for a thirty-third wedding anniversary, and amethyst is the modern one. Iron is the plain, strong stuff that holds a house up, and thirty-three years in, that’s what most marriages have become: the frame everything else hangs on.
Why iron
Strength, the second time around
Iron turns up early in a marriage too: Emily Post’s classic list gives it for the 6th anniversary. At thirty-three it comes back, and this time you know exactly how much strength the two of you have, because you’ve had to use it.
Hallmark takes the theme literally, suggesting a pair of memberships so you can strength-train together, because ‘it’s never too late to build strength!’ It’s sound advice in your fifties and sixties, and the company makes the early mornings easier.
Close to home
Iron lace on Australian verandahs
From the 1850s into the 1900s, decorative cast-iron lace shaded the fronts of nearly every Australian house, terrace, pub and shop. Melbourne alone had 42 foundries, and many of them began by copying imported patterns.
A good deal of it is still standing, painted and repainted by every family who lived behind it, as on the late Victorian terraces of Woollahra in Sydney. An afternoon walking an old street like that, looking up, makes a fine anniversary outing.
Around the world
Tin, and a purple stone
Germany calls the 33rd the Zinnhochzeit, the tin wedding, and Spanish lists also give tin. In France it’s the noces de porphyre, after porphyry, a stone whose deep purple form was prized by Roman emperors.
Imperial porphyry was quarried in Egypt’s Eastern Desert and used for columns, emperors’ busts and their coffins. Byzantine empresses gave birth in a palace room called the Porphyra, which is where the phrase ‘born in the purple’ comes from, and it sits nicely beside the amethyst of the modern list.
33rd anniversary symbols
Iron, amethyst and admiration
Iron and amethyst
Hallmark gives iron for the 33rd, and The Knot’s modern list gives amethyst. Neither appears on the oldest lists: an 1876 newspaper list went straight from pearls at thirty to rubies at forty.
Amethyst
The name comes from the ancient Greek amethystos, ‘not drunk’, because the stone was believed to prevent intoxication. GIA also gives amethyst for the 6th and 17th anniversaries, so there may already be a piece in the jewellery box.
A flower called amethyst
No flower is set for the 33rd, but Kate Greenaway’s 1884 Language of Flowers lists a plant called amethyst, meaning admiration. If you can’t find one, a posy of violets, which stood for faithfulness in Victorian flower language, keeps the colour and the sentiment.
Celebrating the 33rd
Make a little time for the two of you
Book a table at a restaurant that has been open as long as you’ve been married, take the grandchildren to the spot where you had your first date, or spend a slow Saturday morning at the markets with no list and no hurry. Thirty-three years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
Since German and Spanish lists give tin for the 33rd, fill a biscuit tin with something homemade, like Anzac biscuits, shortbread or a batch of your mother’s fudge, and leave it where they’ll find it with the morning coffee.
If you’d rather keep it private, slip a handwritten note into a coat pocket. It will be found on a cold morning, which is the best time to find one.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 33rd means to others
Letters that capture thirty-three years
After thirty-three years, the grandchildren may know your love story better than you do, with a few improvements. A letter lets you set the record straight, and say thank you while you’re at it. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about year thirty-three.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Ian,
When you retired, you announced you were finally going to learn the piano. I gave it three weeks. It has been two years, and you can now play ‘Moon River’ well enough that the neighbours have stopped closing their windows.
This year you also drove Mum to every appointment, taught Noah to ride a bike and built a cubby house the council would probably want to inspect.
Thirty-three years ago I married a man who made me laugh. You still do, mostly on purpose.
Happy anniversary. Play me something after dinner.
All my love,
Lyn
Dear Ros,
Thirty-three years ago you walked into the registry office in a yellow dress your mother hated and told me I could still back out. I didn’t, and I’ve never been surer of anything since.
This year you finally retired from the school, joined two book clubs, started Italian lessons and stopped answering the phone before nine. I’ve never seen you so happy, or so busy.
We’ve always been good at the big things. This year I noticed how good you are at the small ones: the tea before I ask for it, the birthday cards that never go out late, the way you remember the name of every grandchild’s teacher.
Happy anniversary, cara mia. I’ve been practising.
Love,
Alan
Dear Chris,
You asked me out at a twenty-first in Toowoomba and I said no, because you’d just spilt a rum and cola down my back. You asked again a month later, sober and dry, and here we are.
Thirty-three years married, two daughters, one son-in-law we like and one we’re still deciding about, and three grandchildren who treat you as a climbing frame.
I still think about how close I came to missing all of it over one drink. Thank you for asking twice.
Happy anniversary. I’ll buy the drinks tonight, and I’ll carry them.
Love always,
Karen
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the thirty-three-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
Alex and Sue Tatham, from Pelsall near Walsall, met on Cilla Black’s Blind Date in 1988, after a friend applied on Sue’s behalf, and became the first couple from the show to marry. Cilla and her husband came to the wedding in 1991. On their 33rd anniversary the Tathams renewed their vows in the same village church, on the very weekend it celebrated its own 180th birthday. Sue remembers they ‘got on straight away’ on their first date in Ireland.
Written the morning after her 33rd anniversary, this essay watches Roberta’s husband, David, a musician and teacher, getting ready for work, and wanders back through three decades: a fight over Boggle scoring settled by touching his hand, an old scare that he might leave, and the silk robe she bought him that she now wears herself. She calls their marriage ‘tidal’. (Some mild language, and a frank line or two about married life.)
A daughter writes about watching her parents’ wedding videos with them on their 33rd anniversary: the groomsmen tossing a football with the rings tied on, a flower girl lying on the floor to gaze up during the first dance, and her dad still tearing up about how beautiful her mum looked. A gentle push to dig out your own footage.
33rd anniversary FAQ
