Anniversary Anxiety

It was my seventh wedding anniversary yesterday and I struggled to find a gift for my husband. By struggle, I mean, the seven minutes I spent looking felt like seventy.

Usually we keep it pretty low-key. When we first got married, we went out to dinner to celebrate, but we’ve never really exchanged gifts.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure why we don’t exchange gifts. My love language is gifts so I’m pretty sure that wasn’t mydecision. Well, this year I had a little jingle in my pocket and I wanted to get something for him as a small token of how much I appreciate the self-sacrificing man he is. Here was my thought process: Hey, I’m classy. Well, at least sometimes, and what do classy people do? They buy a gift off that traditional gift list someone made up.

So a quick Google search pulled up a list of traditional wedding anniversary gifts. Let me tell you, the list looks pretty good when you get down to the bottom: pearls, silver, gold, emeralds, diamonds. I guess those nice gifts are at the end because you can afford that kind of stuff when you’re old.

Do you want to know the traditional gift for a seventh anniversary? Copper or wool.

C.o.p.p.e.r. or W.o.o.l.

What comes to your mind? Let me tell you the only things I could think of: a sack of pennies and a pair of socks. Or I could stuff the socks with some pennies.

So then I searched online for actual traditional gifts for seventh anniversaries of the copper and wool persuasion. Most were some sort of trinket or knick-knack, many of them with the ability to personalize (gasp!)

Let me tell you something about me:

1. I hate knick-knacks or anything else that can clutter up my home.
2. I’m not a fan of personalization, with the exception of stationary or initials on something practical.
3. My husband and I are graduates of FPU, and that means we believe in making purchases with cash. That makes spending cash much more painful, so we always make sure we really like what we are paying for.

With that being said, I refused to buy any of their suggested gifts because I didn’t want to buy him a gift just to buy a gift. I needed to like it. Well, I wanted him to like it, too.

See, if I was the one making a list of modern day anniversary gifts, you know what would be the seventh celebration gift?

A gift card to Dunkin’ Donuts, because husbands deserve a half-priced happy hour iced latte every once in a while for putting up with their wives (let’s admit it, most of us are crazy).

Don’t worry. I’ll let him know when he should start looking at the traditional gift list in approximately eighteen years.

But for now, cheers!