17 Anniversary Gifts For Him That Follow The Traditional Year
One gift for every year the tradition names, from paper at the first to silver at the twenty-fifth, including the two years the list gets wrong and the one material you are not legally allowed to buy.
There is a list, and most people meet it the same way: somebody mentions that the second anniversary is cotton, and a perfectly good evening is lost to searching for something, anything, made of cotton that a grown man would want. The list wins these encounters. It is why so many second anniversaries end in novelty socks.
Which is a shame, because the premise is sound. Paper first, then cotton, leather, wood; on through iron and copper and steel until silver at twenty-five. The materials harden as the years accumulate. It is a small, sentimental piece of engineering, and it survives because it gives an impossible question a shape.
So this is the list taken at its word. One gift for each year, chosen because it is genuinely the material and genuinely something he would want, in that order. Where the tradition breaks down, and it breaks down twice, you will find it said plainly rather than papered over.
With affection, the editors.
PRODUCT // THE PORTRAIT OF A CITY The Portrait of a City.
Taschen, hardcover, a place rather than a person.
Paper is the first year because paper is the thing that does not last, which is either a grim joke or an invitation to spend the next fifty years disproving it. The way out is to buy paper with weight. Taschen prints these city histories at a size that makes them furniture, and the whole gift turns on choosing the right one: the city where you met, or married, or spent the week that decided it. New York is linked here. London, Rome, Los Angeles and San Francisco exist in the same series, and the correct answer is whichever one he would open first.
PRODUCT // THE KITCHEN APRON The Kitchen Apron.
Hedley & Bennett, eight-ounce canvas, caviar.
Cotton is the second year, and cotton is a material that only improves by being used badly: washed too hot, dried too long, worn until it gives. This is the apron that professional kitchens buy, eight ounces of canvas with brass hardware and a towel loop, and it will spend a decade collecting evidence of everything he has cooked. There is a version of this gift that is a novelty pair of socks. This is the other version. It only lands if he cooks, but if he cooks it lands hard.
PRODUCT // THE CLASSIC MOC The Classic Moc.
Red Wing, oil-tanned, Goodyear welted.
Three years in, leather is the first material on the list that rewards time rather than merely surviving it. These crease where he walks, darken where he handles them, and can be resoled indefinitely, which means the boots bought for a third anniversary are plausibly still in the hallway for the twentieth. Two practical notes. The fit runs generous on the No. 23 last, so most people size down. And Amazon lists boots by size, so check the selector before ordering rather than after.
PRODUCT // THE SWISS SECATEURS The Swiss Secateurs.
Felco, forged handles, entirely rebuildable.
The fourth year is where the American and British lists part company: fruit and flowers here, linen there. Fruit is a difficult gift because it is gone by Thursday, so the better reading is the tool that produces it. Every part of a Felco comes apart and can be replaced, blade, spring, handle, which is why people are still using pairs bought in the seventies. Give it to a man with anything growing in the ground and it becomes the object he reaches for every spring for the rest of his life.
PRODUCT // THE INLAID BOARD The Inlaid Board.
Walnut and maple, weighted pieces, a game for two.
Wood at five years, and the temptation is a cutting board, which is a gift for the kitchen rather than for him. A chess set is the better answer, partly because the walnut and maple squares are genuinely the material and partly because it is the only object on this list that requires two people to work. Five years is roughly the point at which a couple stops filling every evening with plans. Something to do across a table, slowly, is a more useful present than it sounds.
PRODUCT // THE CAST IRON SKILLET The Cast Iron Skillet.
Field Company, No. 8, milled smooth.
Iron is the sixth year and cast iron is the least metaphorical gift here, which is its charm. The Field pan is machined smooth rather than left with the sandy pebble finish of the cheap ones, and it is light enough at just over four pounds that it gets lifted daily instead of admired weekly. It will outlive both of you and it costs less than a dinner out. The seasoning improves with neglect of exactly the right kind, which is a thing worth saying out loud on an anniversary.
PRODUCT // THE BOSTON SHAKER The Boston Shaker.
Sertodo, hand-hammered, unlined.
Copper is the seventh year, and copper is the one material on this list that visibly keeps a record. It arrives bright, and within a season it has gone through pink and rose into something closer to old bronze, and every drink he makes moves it further along. Almost every copper item on Amazon is thin plate over steel from a seller with a keyword for a name. This is solid, heavy-gauge, and hammered by an actual workshop. Unlined copper and citrus is a real debate, so shake in it rather than store in it.
PRODUCT // THE SHARPENING STONES The Sharpening Stones.
Spyderco, alumina ceramic, two grits.
Here is where the tradition falls over, and it seems more useful to say so than to pretend. The eighth year is bronze or pottery, and bronze is effectively unbuyable: search it and you will find resin, brass, and a great deal of furniture described as bronze finish. So take the other half of the year. These are ceramic rods, set at fixed angles, and they turn a drawer of dull knives back into knives in about four minutes. The eighth year is a good one for restoring an edge to things.
PRODUCT // THE BREAD CLOCHE The Bread Cloche.
Emile Henry, glazed ceramic, charcoal.
Pottery arrives properly at nine, and the best pottery gift is the one that does something a metal object cannot. A domed ceramic lid traps the steam coming off a rising loaf, which is the entire trick a professional bread oven performs and a domestic oven cannot. He puts dough in, closes it, and forty minutes later takes out a loaf with a crust that cracks. If he has ever mentioned sourdough, even once, in a tone you would describe as ominous, this is the year for it.
PRODUCT // THE MOKA EXPRESS The Moka Express.
Bialetti, cast aluminium, unchanged since 1933.
Ten years in, the material is tin or aluminium, and the aluminium reading gives you the single most-used object in several million European kitchens. The design has not meaningfully changed since 1933, which is a decent thing to hand someone at a decade. It wants to be hand washed, and the inside is supposed to darken; the film that builds up is the reason the fourth pot tastes better than the first. Anyone who scours it back to bare metal has misunderstood both the pot and the anniversary.
PRODUCT // THE COBRA PLIERS The Cobra Pliers.
Knipex, chrome-vanadium, two sizes.
Steel is the eleventh year and steel is where the list stops being sentimental and starts being useful. These are the pliers that tradesmen buy with their own money, push-button adjustable, with teeth hard enough to hold a rounded nut that has defeated everything else in the drawer. The two-piece set covers almost anything a house will present. Counterfeits exist, so buy from a seller you recognise. Unromantic on the face of it, and then used roughly once a fortnight for twenty years.
PRODUCT // THE SILK PAJAMAS The Silk Pajamas.
LilySilk, twenty-two momme, mulberry silk.
Silk is the twelfth year, and silk for men collapses almost immediately into ties, which is a gift for his employer rather than for him. Sleepwear is the honest alternative. Momme is the weight measure, and twenty-two is the point at which silk stops feeling like a costume and starts feeling like bedding: heavy, cool, quiet. It is the most expensive-feeling thing on this list and among the least visible, which is roughly the correct instinct at twelve years. Sizing runs small, so read the chart.
PRODUCT // THE LATTICE PIPE The Lattice Pipe.
Turkish meerschaum, hand-carved, openwork.
Lace at thirteen is the year that most guides quietly skip, or answer with a pair of boots on the grounds that boots have laces. The more honest answer is openwork, and meerschaum is the material carvers have cut into lattice for two centuries, because the stone is soft enough to work and porous enough to colour. It starts chalk white and turns amber from the bowl outward, unevenly, over years of use. This one only makes sense for a man who smokes a pipe. For everyone else the boots are waiting.
PRODUCT // THE SHAVING SET The Shaving Set.
Edwin Jagger, imitation ivory, nickel.
The fourteenth year is ivory, and ivory cannot be bought. Commercial trade in elephant ivory has been closed in the United States since a Fish and Wildlife Service rule took effect in 2016, with narrow exceptions for genuine antiques, and several states go further still. So the year is a colour now rather than a substance. This is a razor, a badger brush and a stand in cream resin, and the handle is the point: it turns four rushed minutes at a sink into something closer to a ritual.
PRODUCT // THE LISMORE TUMBLERS The Lismore Tumblers.
Waterford, cut crystal, a pair.
Crystal at fifteen, and Lismore is the pattern most people picture when they picture cut crystal at all: diamond and wedge cuts drawn in 1952 and still in production. Buy the pair rather than the single, which sounds obvious and is the mistake people make. The weight is the whole argument. A drink in one of these is a slightly more deliberate act than a drink in an ordinary glass, and fifteen years is a reasonable moment to start being deliberate about the evening.
PRODUCT // THE ARITA SAKE SET The Arita Sake Set.
Arita porcelain, one carafe, four cups.
China at twenty means porcelain, not the country, and almost all of the porcelain sold as an anniversary gift is floral tableware aimed squarely at somebody else. Arita is where Japanese porcelain began in the early seventeenth century, and a sake set is the form that gets handled rather than displayed. Four cups matters more than it appears to. Twenty years in, most of the good evenings involve other people, and this is a thing designed to be carried to a table with friends already sitting at it.
PRODUCT // THE CENTURY BALLPOINT The Century Ballpoint.
Cross, sterling silver, refillable indefinitely.
Silver is the twenty-fifth year and the oldest part of the whole tradition, older by centuries than the list it now sits in. The instinct is jewellery, which many men will accept politely and never wear. A pen is the alternative that gets carried. This one is solid sterling, slim, mechanically guaranteed for life, and it takes a patina from being handled that no amount of polishing quite removes. Twenty-five years of being signed with, which is a reasonable thing to hand somebody at twenty-five years.
A few honest questions, answered.
Where does the material list actually come from? +
The top of it is genuinely old. Silver at twenty-five and gold at fifty come from medieval Germanic custom, where a wife was given a silver wreath at twenty-five years and a gold one at fifty. Everything in between is far newer and far more commercial: the year-by-year list was largely filled in and standardised in 1937 by the American National Retail Jeweler Association. So the sentiment is real and so is the sales motive, which is worth knowing without necessarily minding.
Traditional list or modern list? +
This page follows the traditional one, which is the materials. There is a competing twentieth-century modern list that swaps in categories like clocks, appliances and desk sets, and it is much duller to shop from. Where the two lists disagree, the traditional version almost always gives the better object. Note too that the American and British traditional lists diverge in places, most sharply at year four, which is fruit and flowers here and linen in Britain.
Why do some years skip, and where are sixteen through nineteen? +
Years one through fifteen have a material each, and then the tradition thins out to milestones every five years. Sixteen through nineteen do exist on some expanded modern charts, but they are late additions with almost no cultural weight and no shopping tradition behind them, so this list goes from fifteen to twenty to twenty-five. If you are marking one of the in-between years, take the nearest milestone material and use it early.
What if the material is impossible for the year we are on? +
Two years on this list genuinely resist. Bronze at eight has no honest supply, since nearly everything sold as bronze is a finish rather than a metal, so we take the pottery half of that year instead. Ivory at fourteen cannot be bought at all, because the United States closed commercial elephant ivory trade in 2016. In both cases the fix is to read the year as a colour or a cousin material rather than abandon it, which is what the tradition has always quietly done anyway.
A jewellers' invention,
and a useful one.
It is worth remembering that a retail trade body wrote most of this list, and wrote it to sell more objects. That should probably make it easier to dismiss than it does. What survives the cynicism is the shape of the thing: a material for each year, getting harder as the years get longer, so that the question stops being what does he want and becomes what is this year made of. That is a much better question. It has an answer, and the answer is usually on a shelf somewhere, waiting to be chosen properly.