A milestone worth celebrating
34th Anniversary Gifts
Hallmark’s theme for the thirty-fourth anniversary is food, and New Zealand’s national encyclopedia lists opal as the gift.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of thirty-four years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Food, Opal and Amber: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
A cooking class for two
Hallmark suggests taking a cooking class together. Pick the cuisine from the best holiday you ever had, or one you’ve always meant to learn, and come home with a dish neither of you could make before.
Frame the menu
Book the best restaurant you can justify and, as Hallmark suggests, ask for a copy of the menu to date and frame. Write on the back what you each ordered and who ended up eating whose dessert.
The family recipe book
Gather the dishes that fed your family: the birthday cake, the Sunday curry, the slice everyone asks for at Christmas. Write each one out by hand with a line about who loves it, and print a copy for each of the children.
Solid opal, and how to tell
Geoscience Australia explains that a triplet is a sliver of opal about half a millimetre thick, glued between a dark backing and a clear dome. Triplets are common in airport shops and sell for a fraction of the price of solid opal, so for an anniversary piece, ask for solid opal and have it written on the receipt.
Out to Coober Pedy
In 1915 a party prospecting for gold at the edge of the Great Victoria Desert made camp, and a 14-year-old boy found an opal. The rush that followed founded Coober Pedy, still the main source of white opal, where opalised shells and fish bones are fairly common finds.
Amber with a passenger
Amber sometimes holds a tiny creature or a scrap of plant that was caught in the resin as it oozed from the tree. A pendant with an insect sealed inside makes a talking point at every family lunch.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate thirty-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 thirty-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 34th means
Why food and opal
for thirty-four years?
Food is Hallmark’s theme for a thirty-fourth wedding anniversary, and opal is the gift on the longer anniversary table kept by New Zealand’s national encyclopedia. One celebrates the table you’ve shared all these years, and the other is a stone that changes colour every time you move it.
Why food and opal
Twelve thousand dinners and counting
Thirty-four years of marriage adds up to more than 12,000 evening meals, from the takeaway in the first flat to the roast that now feeds the grandchildren. Most of the family news got told over those plates, so a food anniversary is a thank-you for all those ordinary nights at the table.
Opal is made of tiny spheres of silica packed together with water in between, and the spheres split white light into colours. Geoscience Australia explains that large spheres give every colour while small ones give only blues and greens, which is why an opal with plenty of red is so rare.
Where it began
A year the old lists left blank
Early anniversary lists had nothing to say about the thirty-fourth. Sydney’s Australian Town and Country Journal printed one in 1880 and Brisbane’s Telegraph another in 1937, and both went straight from pearl at thirty to ruby at forty. Emily Post’s Etiquette of 1922 skipped even further, from silver at twenty-five to gold at fifty.
In 1937 American jewellers filled in much more of the list, according to the Emily Post Institute, but the Institute’s own list still has no thirty-fourth. Food comes from Hallmark’s year-by-year guide, and opal from the gift table in Te Ara, New Zealand’s national encyclopedia, which says some of its later gifts appear to be fairly modern.
Around the world
Amber weddings and poppy weddings
In France the thirty-fourth is the noces d’ambre, the amber wedding, and German lists call it the Bernsteinhochzeit, which means the same thing. German sources add that there’s no standard list in Germany or Austria, so the names often change from region to region.
Spanish lists give amapola, the poppy. Dutch, Italian and Japanese lists don’t name the thirty-fourth at all, and jump straight to the thirty-fifth, where coral takes over.
34th anniversary symbols
Food, opal and amber
Food and opal
One gets eaten and one gets kept, so they work well side by side. Make the day about a long meal somewhere you love, and bring home a small piece of opal to remember it by.
Opal
GIA notes that the Romans called opal opalus, a word that meant ‘precious stone’. Australia produces about 95 per cent of the world’s precious opal, according to Geoscience Australia, and opal is the country’s official national gemstone. It is also the birthstone for October.
Amber
Amber isn’t a stone at all but fossilised tree resin. People have treasured it since Neolithic times, and it has been worked as a gem since the days of ancient Greece and Rome.
Celebrating the 34th
Make a little time for the two of you
Drive back to the suburb of your first flat and see if the takeaway shop is still there, spend a night at a country pub with an open fire, or let the grandchildren plan a picnic and follow their menu to the letter. Thirty-four years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
For a food anniversary, cook your wedding reception menu again for the family, however dated it looks now. Put the wedding photos on the table between courses and let the children laugh at the hair.
Whatever you plan, slip a note under their plate. A few lines in your own handwriting will outlast the meal.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 34th means to others
Letters that capture thirty-four years
After thirty-four years, most of what you feel for each other gets said in small ways: the cup of tea that arrives without asking, the car warmed up on a frosty morning. A letter puts some of it into words, and it’s the kind of thing that gets read more than once. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about thirty-four years, opal and amber.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Phil,
Thirty-four years ago you promised to love, honour and cook on Tuesdays. By my count you have now made spaghetti bolognese about seventeen hundred times. It has never once tasted the same twice, and I’ve loved every version, even the one with the cinnamon.
This year you retired, took up sourdough and taught Mia to crack an egg with one hand. The kitchen has never been messier or happier.
At our wedding you told me you’d keep me fed and laughing. Both promises kept. I’ve booked the corner table at Rosa’s for Saturday, and someone else can do the dishes.
All my love,
Karen
Dear Wendy,
I looked it up, and the thirty-fourth is the food anniversary. After thirty-four years of my cooking, I think you’ve earned a year off from that particular gift.
It’s been a big year. Dad moved in after his fall, and you turned the sewing room into his bedroom in a single weekend without one complaint, at least not one he heard. He tells everyone your scones are better than Mum’s. Please never repeat that to her sisters.
When we married in Toowoomba you had a borrowed veil and I had a borrowed tie. Thirty-four years later, everything we have is ours, including the house, finally paid off in March.
Happy anniversary. Let’s spend some of that mortgage money on the outback trip you keep pointing at on the map.
Love,
Doug
To us,
Thirty-four years, three children, two dogs called Biscuit (not at the same time) and one caravan we should never have bought.
Things we’ve learned: never talk about money when you’re hungry. The good plates are for using. If one of us says ‘I’m fine’ in that voice, the other one puts the kettle on.
Things we’re still working on: reversing the caravan, agreeing on the thermostat, and remembering whose turn it is to ring the grandkids on a Sunday.
Things we promise: a long lunch every month, just the two of us, with the phones in the car. And a dance in the kitchen whenever the radio plays our song.
Here’s to the next course.
With love,
Sue and Martin
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the thirty-four-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
Anne Gagliano married her husband, Mike, a Seattle fire captain, when they were both 20, and wrote this list for their thirty-fourth anniversary. It opens with her grazing his forehead with the cake knife on their wedding day, a reminder that the people closest to us are the easiest to hurt, and moves on through children, grandchildren and his retirement. Warm, frank and easy to borrow from.
Graeme and Louella Gardiner, now in their seventies, were between jobs when friends from the Walgett area took them down an opal mine. Thirty-four years later they’re still working a claim at Lightning Ridge, after early years in a windowless tin shed and stretches of three or four years without a single find. Their children grew up visiting the fields, and now the grandchildren do too.
France and Germany call the thirty-fourth the amber wedding, and this is the most famous amber gift of all. In 1716 the King of Prussia gave Peter the Great a room panelled in amber to seal an alliance, and after later work it held about six tons of amber and other stones. German soldiers took it apart during the Second World War, and in the last months of the war the crates vanished. A replica was finished in 2003 and is on show near St Petersburg.
34th anniversary FAQ
