A milestone worth celebrating
49th Anniversary Gifts
Hallmark’s theme for the forty-ninth anniversary is copper.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of forty-nine years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Copper, Cedar and Zircon: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
Copper pans for the cook
Hallmark’s bigger idea is a set of copper cookware for the one who loves to cook. Hang the pans where you can see them; they look good even when nobody is cooking.
Something with a copper finish
Hallmark’s smaller ideas include copper earrings, a teakettle or a picture frame. Put your wedding photo in the frame and the kettle on the stove, and you’ve covered both of you.
Coins from your wedding year
Australia’s old one-cent coin, with Stuart Devlin’s feathertail glider, was 97 per cent copper. One- and two-cent coins were withdrawn in 1992, so ask a coin dealer for a pair from the year you married and mount them in a small frame.
A long weekend on the Copper Coast
Kadina, Moonta and Wallaroo, on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, hold the Kernewek Lowender in May of odd-numbered years. It claims to be the world’s largest Cornish festival outside Cornwall, so go hungry: there will be pasties.
Something in red cedar
The French name the forty-ninth for cedar. Australia’s own red cedar was so prized by settlers they called it ‘red gold’, and so much was cut that it is now commercially extinct, which makes an old cedar chest or side table from an antique dealer a handsome find.
A blue zircon
Spain calls the forty-ninth the zircon wedding. Zircon is a natural gem, not the man-made cubic zirconia, and GIA says its sparkle is close enough to diamond’s to have caused centuries of confusion. It comes in blue, green, yellow and red, and it’s a December birthstone.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate forty-nine 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 forty-nine 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 49th means
Why copper
for forty-nine years?
Copper is Hallmark’s theme for a forty-ninth wedding anniversary. It’s a warm, hard-working metal that has stayed useful for thousands of years, which suits a marriage standing one year short of gold.
Why copper
Still in use, and still warm
Copper was one of the first metals people learned to use, at least 10,000 years ago, and its name comes from the Latin for ‘metal of Cyprus’. It carries heat and electricity well, so it has spent most of its history doing useful jobs.
It can also be recycled without losing any quality, and an estimated 80 per cent of all the copper ever mined is still in use today. Something that keeps working, and gets reused rather than replaced, is a fair picture of forty-nine years together.
Where it began
Wool first, then copper
The oldest lists put wool, not copper, at seven years. Sydney’s Australian Town and Country Journal called the seventh the woollen wedding in 1880, and Brisbane’s Telegraph still did in 1937.
Copper joined wool later: Emily Post’s classic list gives copper or wool for the seventh, and Debrett’s British list gives wool and copper. Hallmark brought copper back for the forty-ninth, which is seven times seven. We couldn’t find anyone who explains the repeat, so take it as a happy coincidence.
Around the world
Cedar in France, zircon in Spain
French lists name the forty-ninth the noces de cèdre, the cedar wedding, and Spanish lists the bodas de circón, the zircon wedding. The German, Dutch, Italian and Japanese lists don’t name the year at all.
Germany does have copper weddings, though. Depending on the list, the kupferne Hochzeit falls at seven years or at twenty, and the seventh can also be the woollen wedding, just as it was in Australia.
49th anniversary symbols
Copper, zircon and zinnias
Copper
Copper is the theme on Hallmark’s year-by-year list, not an old tradition, so there’s plenty of room to play. One of Hallmark’s ideas is a copper salt shaker and pepper mill, with a note saying ‘you two just go together’.
None set, but zircon in Spain
No English-language list gives a gemstone for the forty-ninth. Spain’s zircon has an Australian claim to fame: zircon crystals from the Jack Hills in Western Australia, about 4.4 billion years old, are the oldest minerals yet dated on Earth.
None set, so try zinnias
There’s no flower for this year either. In Victorian flower language, zinnias stood for lasting affection, which after forty-nine years seems about right.
Celebrating the 49th
Make a little time for the two of you
Cook the meal from your wedding reception at home, badly if necessary; take a day trip to the town where one of you grew up; or book a long table for the family and let the grandchildren make the speeches. Forty-nine years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
Next year is the golden one, so use this one to dream it up. Write a list together of who you’d invite and where you’d go, and keep it somewhere safe: the forty-ninth makes a very good rehearsal.
Before the big one arrives, write a few lines just for the two of you. Small and private suits a forty-ninth.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 49th means to others
Letters that capture forty-nine years
One year short of gold, the forty-ninth can get lost in the planning for the fiftieth. That’s a good reason to write something now, while it’s just the two of you. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about copper.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Dennis,
Forty-nine years ago you turned up to our wedding with a haircut your sister had given you in her kitchen. Mum still mentions it. You looked wonderful, and slightly lopsided.
Since then you’ve put up shelves in four houses, coached a decade of under-nines, learned to use video calls so you can read bedtime stories to the grandkids in Darwin, and kept up with my coffee order through three changes of mind.
I know everyone is already talking about next year. I wanted to say thank you this year, while it’s quiet. You’ve made an ordinary life feel lucky.
Happy anniversary. Your sister has offered to do your hair for the fiftieth. I said no.
All my love,
Joan
Dear Lyn,
When I asked your father for your hand, he said, ‘She’ll have you, but you’ll have to learn to dance.’ Forty-nine years and a great many weddings later I still can’t, and you still drag me up for the Nutbush.
You’ve run the house, the school canteen and half the netball club, and still found time to sit with my mother every Thursday at the end. I don’t think I ever thanked you properly for that. Thank you.
The kids have big plans for next year, and I’ve been told to act surprised. I’m practising.
Happy anniversary, love. Save me a slow one.
Love,
Graeme
To us, at forty-nine,
This is a practice letter. Next year there’ll be a cake, a speech and probably a slideshow with that photo from Bali. This year it’s the two of us at the kitchen table, and that suits us fine.
Things we’ve got right: the dog, the caravan, saying sorry before bed (mostly). Things we haven’t: the caravan annex, which neither of us can put up without a cross word.
For the next twelve months we promise one new place each season, the grandkids every second Sunday, and less time spent looking for our glasses.
See you at fifty.
Love,
Us
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the forty-nine-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
When Burra’s copper mine opened in the 1840s, many Cornish miners and their families made their first homes by digging into the banks of the Burra Burra Creek. Some were one-room caves; others had carpet, timber doors, glazed windows and papered walls, and every one had a chimney. An old-timer remembered casks placed over the chimney holes so night travellers on the road above wouldn’t fall into someone’s kitchen, and the practical jokers who took them off.
When Princess Anne married Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, Australia’s official present was copper: twelve hand-beaten wine chalices and twelve hand-beaten beer mugs, in presentation cases made from Mount Isa copper. The Governor-General and Lady Hasluck added twelve copper sherry chalices of their own. A one-page press release, and proof that a copper wedding gift can be fit for a princess.
The Statue of Liberty was copper-coloured when it went up in New York Harbor in 1886, and green by 1906. This short piece explains that the green patina protects a copper skin less than 2.4 mm thick, so polishing it back to shiny would thin the metal, and it would go green again within a few years anyway. A good argument for letting a copper gift age the way it wants to.
49th anniversary FAQ
