A milestone worth celebrating
35th Anniversary Gifts
Coral is the traditional thirty-fifth anniversary gift, with jade as the modern alternative.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of thirty-five years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Coral, Jade and Emerald: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
Book for the coral spawning
On a handful of nights each year, corals on the Great Barrier Reef release clouds of pink, yellow and orange bundles that look like an underwater snowstorm. The Reef Authority says it usually happens one to six nights after the October, November and December full moons, so plan a reef stay for late spring or early summer and ask about night dives.
Try a dive, or just snorkel
Hallmark points out that plenty of dive shops run introductory classes. If a full dive feels like a step too far, a guided snorkel over a shallow reef shows you plenty of coral without the training.
A seafood dinner in coral
Hallmark’s idea is a home-cooked dinner for two with coral napkins and candles. Make it prawns or a whole baked snapper, put out the good glasses, and send the dog to the neighbours’ for the night.
Jade in an unexpected colour
Green is the most prized jade colour, but GIA lists white, orange, yellow, lavender and black jade as well. A lavender pendant or a white jade bangle is the modern 35th anniversary gift in a colour few people expect.
Emerald, garden and all
GIA names emerald as the gem of both the twentieth and thirty-fifth anniversaries. Expect to see inclusions: dealers call them the stone’s ‘jardin’, or garden, and no two gardens look alike.
Pounamu from the South Island
New Zealand’s jade, pounamu, is found only in the South Island, and Te Ara explains that it is highly treasured by Māori tribes throughout the country. A carved pounamu piece from a South Island maker brings back a trip across the Tasman and the modern gift in one.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate thirty-five 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-five 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 35th means
Why coral and jade
for thirty-five years?
Coral is the traditional gift for a thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and jade the modern one. Both have been treasured for thousands of years, and both suit a marriage that has grown slowly into something hard to break.
Why coral and jade
Built slowly, hard to break
The red coral used in jewellery is the hard skeleton of a sea creature that lives mainly in the Mediterranean, anywhere from 10 to 300 metres down. People have harvested it since ancient times, and coral jewellery has turned up in ancient Egyptian and prehistoric European burials.
Jade is the opposite of fragile. GIA says it isn’t especially hard for a gem but is extremely tough, which is why Neolithic people made knives and axe heads from it. Thirty-five years in, most couples know the difference between hard and tough.
Where it began
When thirty-five was the lace wedding
The thirty-fifth hasn’t always been coral. A 1910 American guide to weddings and anniversaries called it the lace wedding, while lists printed in Sydney in 1880 and Brisbane in 1937 skipped it altogether, going from pearl at thirty to ruby at forty.
Emily Post’s Etiquette of 1922 had no thirty-fifth either. Today the Emily Post Institute, Hallmark and Debrett’s in Britain all give coral, with jade as the modern alternative, and New Zealand’s Te Ara encyclopedia offers coral or jade.
Around the world
Coral, rubies and linen
Spanish and Italian lists agree with ours: the thirty-fifth is the coral wedding, bodas de coral in Spain and nozze di corallo in Italy. Japan’s list gives both coral and jade, and German lists offer the Korallenhochzeit or the Leinenhochzeit, the linen wedding.
France is the odd one out. There the thirty-fifth is the noces de rubis, the ruby wedding, five years earlier than in English-speaking countries, and Dutch lists split the difference with coral or ruby.
35th anniversary symbols
Coral, jade and emerald
Coral
The Romans hung branches of coral around children’s necks to keep them from harm. It is soft for a gem, about 3.5 on the Mohs scale, so it is usually cut into smooth domes rather than faceted.
Jade
‘Jade’ covers two main minerals, nephrite and jadeite. GIA notes that the Chinese character for jade is one of the oldest in the written language, dating to 2950 BC, and that a pierced jade disk is a Chinese symbol of the sky.
Emerald
GIA records the old belief that wearing an emerald revealed whether a lover’s oath was true or false. Cleopatra was famously fond of emeralds, and the first known emerald mines were in Egypt, worked from at least 330 BC.
Celebrating the 35th
Make a little time for the two of you
Have the family over for a long Sunday lunch and make everyone watch the wedding video, or go back to the beach where you honeymooned and see whether the kiosk still sells the same ice creams. Thirty-five years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
Thirty-five years is halfway to a seventieth, so it’s a good moment for a half-time talk. Each of you write down three things you’d like the next ten years to hold, from a long trip to a grandchild’s graduation, and tuck the lists in the back of the wedding album.
And somewhere in the day, hand over a few lines you wrote yourself. After thirty-five years, it still means a lot to be told.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 35th means to others
Letters that capture thirty-five years
Thirty-five years in, you can finish each other’s sentences, though not always the way the other one meant. A letter lets you get to the end of a thought without interruption, which is a rare treat in any long marriage. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about coral, jade and the thirty-fifth.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Tony,
I told you at breakfast that thirty-five is the coral anniversary. You said, ‘Like the Coral Sea?’ and then explained the Battle of the Coral Sea for twenty minutes while your toast went cold. That’s thirty-five years of marriage in one morning, and I wouldn’t swap a minute of it.
You’ve been there for all of it: three babies, two redundancies, the year we ran the canteen at the footy club, and the day Jess got married in the pouring rain. You held umbrellas, you held babies, and you held my hand in the hospital at two in the morning.
Now there are four grandchildren who call you Pop and think you can fix anything. They’re mostly right.
Happy anniversary, love. Tonight I’ll listen to the Coral Sea again. The short version.
All my love,
Maree
Dear Liz,
When we married at the registry office in Hobart, your mother gave it two years. I have made a point of mentioning this every Christmas since.
This year you finally retired from teaching, and within a fortnight you’d joined the choir, the bushcare group and a Spanish class. I have never seen anyone retire so busily.
You’re still the first person I want to tell things to, good or bad, and the only one who laughs at my jokes the second time round.
Happy thirty-fifth. I’ve booked us a week up north somewhere warm, with nothing at all on the calendar.
Love always,
Geoff
Dear Bruce,
I’m writing this in the van while you argue with the annexe. It’s our thirty-fifth anniversary and you’ve forgotten, which is fine, because I’ve forgotten six of yours and you never once said so.
Our honeymoon was two nights in a borrowed tent at Wilsons Prom, and it rained the whole time. You promised that one day we’d see the whole country. I thought you were being romantic. It turns out you were being literal.
We’ve crossed the Nullarbor twice now. I’ve learned to reverse a van, you’ve learned to like country music, and we’ve both learned that the best fish and chips in Australia are wherever we happen to be hungry.
Happy anniversary, my love. Come inside when you’ve won the fight with the annexe. There are two cold ones in the fridge.
Yours, still in the passenger seat,
Lyn
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the thirty-five-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
This columnist wrote his anniversary story on the day of his thirty-fifth. It begins at a Jamestown disco in 1979, where Sally asked him to dance, and he proposed on the same dance floor five months later. They married the next March in a snowstorm that stranded relatives, while the flower girl stayed home with chicken pox. Given the choice of coral or jade, he picks jade.
South Australia has its own jade. In 1965 a farmer named Harry Schiller picked up a boulder in the Minbrie Ranges near Cowell that turned out to be high-quality nephrite, and the area became known for black jade. This feature follows Niel and Pat Smith, who pegged a lease in 1970, mined it in the farming off-season, and still make jewellery from what’s left to sell in town.
This chapter from a 1910 American party guide shows how a lace wedding was meant to be thrown, and it doesn’t hold back. Invitations are written on lace-edged linen handkerchiefs, lace is draped over the mantelpiece and mirrors, and guests may come to dinner in powdered wigs and satin as the court of Louis XVI. Pistachio and vanilla ices finish the night.
35th anniversary FAQ
