Anniversary Materials: A Handy Chart
Hey, it’s your anniversary. That’s great.
Every year has, like, a thing. A material or whatever, specific to that year. I don’t know why. Nobody does. I’ve asked around.
It’s hard to keep track sometimes. So here you go. I’ve compiled them all for you. Celebrate your love as follows:
1 year: Paper anniversary
2 years: Cotton
3 years: Leather
4 years: Linen
5 years: Wood
6 years: Spiders
7 years: Wool
8 years: Bronze
9 years: Maize
10 years: Tin
11 years: Steel
12 years: Crawdad
13 years: Lace
14 years: Rust
15 years: Vortex crystal
16 years: Silver “hollow-ware” (aka “ghost silver”)
17 years: Skin
18 years: Pinch of kosher salt
19 years: More bronze
20 years: Platinum
21 years: Ultra-platinum
22 years: Hyper-platinum
23 years: Bones (animal)
24 years: Bones (human)
25 years: Regular silver
After this, you’re probably going to want to just do the whole “we’re still together and happy” thing every fifth year. It’s exhausting to be loved and cherished as your truest self by your best friend and sexual confidante, isn’t it? Every ha’-decade, surprise them with:
30 years: Diamond
35 years: Conflict diamond
40 years: Ruby
45 years: Vicodin
50 years: Centipede
Did you know that one of your rights as a citizen of any United State is a warm, personal greeting from the President of America for any wedding anniversary on or after the 50th? Guess what though: who cares. It’s far more meaningful to give your beloved:
55 years: Blood
60 years: Brine
65 years: Boxed set of Hannibal
70 years: Half of a lime
75 years: Plasma
80 years: Oak
85 years: Millipede
90 years: Rocks
95 years: Just a ton of respect!
100 years: Erotic pastries
105 years: Spaceship
110 years: Complete map of the human genome
115 years: Barbecue set
120 years: Chocolate orange
125 years: Handful of sugared cranberries
130 years: The dried pelt of your most powerful enemy
135 years: Graphene
140 years: Jicama
145 years: idk, a meteorite or something
150 years: Coldplay tickets
At this point it becomes easier to count in centuries. As the body ages, each individual year becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your total lifespan. At age 260, for instance, a year feels mathematically the same as one week did when you were a child of 5. The decades slide past you and you’re slowly withering with that ancient curse the old swamp-crone laid all up on you, but that’s no reason not to show your little love-munch how you feel. Tell ’em with:
200 years: Adder eating its own tail
300 years: Necklace of shark teeth
400 years: Glimmer of ancient runes
After 500 years together, your partner is still looking fine. You wake up every morning and you’re like, “Shit yeah, babe. That’s the good stuff.” And it sure is. Because you’re keeping the fire alive with:
500 years: Wind-blasted basalt glyphs
1,000 years: Scent of lilac
1,500 years: Light plinking of lute music but where is it coming from
2,000 years: Vial of cursed magma from deep in the Under-Temple
You communicate only in gestures now, but they are loving, stately, regal. The cool wind sighs through the house, the windows all wide open, the sea’s distant roar leaking in. You have evolved a perfect language of winks and sly looks, each of you in a high-backed armchair, facing each other for centuries, millennia, completely still. Where does the time go? Good thing you remembered to stop at Kroger on the way home and pick up:
5,000 years: A ball of withered twine
10,000 years: Seven black swans, swimming silently in a perfect circle, the surface of the glassy pond somehow making not a ripple beneath them
So print this chart out and keep it with ya. I won’t tell, and they’ll never even know. Trust me on this one, pal, there’s nothing worse than making it all the way to your Vicodin Anniversary and showing up with carnations or an invisible sheet of fucking graphene because you were too busy to go tradish.
Love is magical.