A milestone worth celebrating
36th Anniversary Gifts
Hallmark’s theme for the thirty-sixth anniversary is antiques, and New Zealand’s national encyclopedia lists bone china as the gift.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of thirty-six years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Antiques, Bone China and Muslin: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
A Saturday at the markets
Hallmark suggests hunting for bargains together at a flea market or estate sale. Set a budget, split up for an hour, then meet for coffee and swap what you each found for the other.
Something small and sentimental
Hallmark’s other budget idea is a small antique with meaning, such as a piece of old costume jewellery or vintage cards from the team they’ve followed all their life. An old cricket program from a match they still talk about says you were listening.
A piece from the old country
If their family came from Greece, Scotland or Lebanon, look for an antique made there, as Hallmark suggests. Find out what you can about where it’s been, and write its story on a card to keep with it.
Something from your wedding year
Track down a bottle of wine, a mint coin set or an original pressing of a record from the year you married. Put it away with a note, and open or play it together on your fiftieth.
Odd cups for afternoon tea
Start a collection of mismatched bone china cups and saucers, one for each person you’d most like round the table, grandchildren included. Op shops and online auctions often have single pieces for a few dollars.
A pudding in a cloth
Muslin is the traditional cloth wrapped around a Christmas pudding. Make one together from a family recipe, then hand out slices at Christmas with the story of the anniversary it was made for.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate thirty-six 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-six 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 36th means
Why antiques and bone china
for thirty-six years?
Antiques are Hallmark’s theme for a thirty-sixth wedding anniversary, and bone china is the gift on the longer anniversary table kept by New Zealand’s national encyclopedia. Both are about things that last when they’re looked after, which is a fair description of a marriage at thirty-six.
Why antiques and bone china
Things worth keeping
An antique has already outlived the people who first owned it, and usually a few who came after. Choosing one for a thirty-sixth anniversary says you value what has been kept and cared for, scuffs and all.
Bone china is the stuff of best tea sets and wedding presents, the cups that only come out for visitors and Christmas. Giving it at thirty-six is a gentle nudge to use the good things now, while everyone’s here to enjoy them.
Where it began
From Bow to Stoke-on-Trent
Bone china began in England. Thomas Frye made the first version at his Bow factory in 1748, and Josiah Spode developed the modern recipe in the early 1790s. For about two centuries it was almost entirely an English product, made largely in Stoke-on-Trent.
As an anniversary gift it is a newcomer. The anniversary lists printed in Sydney in 1880 and Brisbane in 1937 didn’t name the thirty-sixth at all, and neither does the Emily Post Institute’s list today.
Around the world
Muslin in France, flint in Spain
In France the thirty-sixth is the noces de mousseline, the muslin wedding. Muslin is a fine plain-weave cotton, usually said to take its name from the city of Mosul in Iraq, and it became hugely popular in eighteenth-century France.
Spanish lists give sílex, flint, for the thirty-sixth. German, Dutch, Italian and Japanese lists leave the year out altogether, so in those countries a thirty-sixth anniversary is yours to name.
36th anniversary symbols
Antiques, bone china and muslin
Antiques
An antique is usually defined as something at least 100 years old, while ‘vintage’ covers things that are old but haven’t reached a century. The rule has roots in a 1930 American tariff law, which exempted ornamental objects made before 1830.
Bone china
Bone china takes its name from bone ash, made by heating animal bone. A traditional recipe is about one quarter kaolin, one quarter china stone and one half bone ash, and today’s definition asks for at least 30 per cent of the body to come from bone ash or calcium phosphate.
Muslin
Bengal was the great centre of muslin weaving, and Mughal Bengal was once the world’s leading exporter. The weaving there stopped in the later 1700s, undercut by cheap cloth from England. Today muslin is the backdrop of choice for many portrait photographers.
Celebrating the 36th
Make a little time for the two of you
Spend a slow morning at a country antiques fair, take the long way home through the towns you once drove through with the children asleep in the back, or get the old slides out and finally sort them into years. Thirty-six years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
Ask each of your children to bring one old thing from the house they grew up in, and tell its story over lunch. Then ask why they kept it.
Afterwards, leave a note where only they will find it, inside a teacup or the cover of the book on their bedside table. Small and unexpected is the whole point.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 36th means to others
Letters that capture thirty-six years
Thirty-six years in, you’ve both become experts on each other: which mood needs a cuppa and which needs leaving well alone. A letter is a chance to show off some of that knowledge, kindly. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about thirty-six years and the things we keep.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Ray,
This morning I found you in the shed, restoring Grandad’s wooden plane for the third time. You said it was an antique. I said so are we. You laughed so hard you had to sit down on the esky.
Thirty-six years ago I married a boy from Wagga with a borrowed ute and very big plans. The plans changed a dozen times, but the boy turned out exactly as promised: steady, funny and handy with a screwdriver.
This was the year of your knee operation. You were a terrible patient, and then three weeks later you nursed me through the flu without a word of complaint.
Happy anniversary. One day we should get ourselves properly valued. I think we’ve gone up.
All my love,
Gail
Dear Annie,
Our wedding china is still in the hutch, every piece bar one gravy boat, which we both know I broke and blamed on the cat.
I’ve been thinking about what else we’ve kept since then. The house in Geelong, mostly. Friends from the first street we lived in. Your laugh, entirely. And a walk after dinner, which started as a way of getting out of the dishes and turned into the best part of my day.
The kids are scattered from Perth to Darwin now, and the grandkids ring for a video call every Sunday. You still set the table for two properly, napkins and all.
Happy anniversary. This weekend we’re using the good china for something that isn’t Christmas. I’ll wash. Carefully.
Love,
Mick
Dear Colin,
Thirty-seven years ago you outbid me on a cedar wardrobe at a clearing sale near Mudgee, then offered to deliver it to my place because it wouldn’t fit in your car. A year later we were married, and the wardrobe came too.
It has moved six times since: two houses, a flat in Sydney, your mother’s, our daughter’s first unit and back again. The doors still stick in summer, like you.
I don’t care what it’s worth. It’s the best thing I never bought.
Happy thirty-sixth. Meet me at the auction in Gulgong on Saturday. This time, bid against somebody else.
Yours,
Bev
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the thirty-six-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
Winston and Clementine Churchill reached their 36th wedding anniversary on 12 September 1944 while staying at the Citadel in Quebec, where he had come for wartime talks with President Roosevelt. At breakfast he presented his wife with a large bouquet, and the Roosevelts, who were staying on the floor above, were the first to congratulate them. Even in the middle of a summit, the anniversary was not forgotten.
This bone china vase, one of a pair, was made at the Spode works in Stoke-on-Trent around 1825 and painted with The Mount at Penkhull, the grand new house of Josiah Spode II. The V&A’s note explains that the mansion was one of the plainest signs of the family’s success with bone china and printed pottery. A good look at how fine early bone china could be.
In July 1952, General Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, took a day off from politics to celebrate their 36th wedding anniversary. They spent the evening at dinner in Denver with Mamie’s mother, Mrs John Doud, in the very house where the couple had been married. Four months later he was elected President of the United States.
36th anniversary FAQ
