Happy Birthday, @bookworm , and Happy Anniversary, @morrismm and your H! I am sure you miss your mom for more than the anniversary check. I do remember my late MIL used to send us a check on our anniversary so we could go out - and a few years our pennies were so stretched, we told her we had gone out for Chinese, but we ended up getting take out instead because it was cheaper. We rarely went out in those early years as I was sick so much, so even getting take-out was a treat.
We don’t celebrate each year but we do take a trip and celebrate the tens…10th, 20th and 30th wedding anniversaries so far…
I don’t know why 35 loomed so large this year, but my kids knew it had been a rough few years for their dad and me. We lost my dad and his, there were medical and business issues and, well, just time went by. I think the fact that our eldest got married this fall put a bug in his head that being married 35 years was a pretty big deal (his wife’s parents are long divorced and it wasn’t an easy time growing), so he and his siblings, along with my H, planned the party. It’s something we’ve never done before, with the exception of a backyard 40th I threw for my H, and it was only our closest friends. Though we’re not usually party people (well, I love to throw parties, but not to celebrate us), it was a great evening. More than anything, I love that our kids went to the effort to do this for us.
Once we had enough money we started travelling once a year without kids, at our anniversary. It has helped cement what to me is a very strong marriage. At 20 years he did get me a new ring. I tell newlyweds all the time, don’t forget to be a couple once kids come into the picture. We were supposed to go to a resort this past September, but the hurricane had other ideas for us. Next year we do plan on hawaii as well. We’ve never been. We have fun for months planning our trips. We run our business through a marriott card and now also an american airlines card. We decided to spend some of the points once a year on us.
Some years we have just gone out to dinner, or we made it at home. Once the kids were old enough to stay alone we’d go to a city for the night. Now we’ve evolved into vacations.
We were married the Saturday night after Thanksgiving which ended up not being a great time to celebrate since we were/are normally with family. In the early years, I think we went out to dinner but, most years, we just exchange two cards, one humorous and one serious. That’s been our tradition for Valentines Day and birthdays too. I did get a new ring around our 20th but, honestly, I was the one to research and find it and I’m not sure that I got it any time near our anniversary. We travel fairly often and have that time alone but it’s rarely connected to our anniversary.
For the past 11 years, I have traveled in our anniversary month. Since H retired 5 years ago, he comes too. We generally make at least one night of the trip an anniversary celebration and go out to a nice dinner at a great restaurant, even tho it’s not necessarily the date of our anniversary.
We’re rarely in the same state (or even country) on our actual anniversary due to it falling during an annual meeting time for DH’s work. This year, the meeting is actually the week before, so we will be in the same city. Only I’ll be dining with other people that evening for a special event that has been on the calendar for a while. LOL.
For that reason, anniversaries have typically been low key They involve the exchange of cards with love letters in them and sometimes there’s a dinner out after he gets back into town. We’ve tried to do something without the kids for bigger anniversaries as close to the date as we can get. For our 5th, my sister watched the kids (babies actually!) while we spent one night at a hotel. I honestly can’t remember what we did for our 10th. Fifteenth we ventured away for two nights at a posh hotel while my parents visited and watched the kids. Scheduling for our 20th ended up being a nightmare and we finally were able to get my sister-in-law to come in 6 months after our anniversary so we could take a cruise. That was cancelled by a hurricane the day before we were supposed to leave. Since we literally had no time to plan, we turned to Facebook and took suggestions for places we could drive within 6 hours. One place rose to the top, we found an available hotel and took off, while asking our friends to make suggestions for what we should do there. I normally research the heck out of what we’re going to do, so this was a big change for us. We basically created a checklist of restaurants and activities based off our friends’ suggestions and had a blast crossing things off the list. Definitely more memorable than whatever it is we did for our 10th!
@collage1, so were we! It has meant celebrating our anniversary in one of three places for most of the past 35 years, and home is only one of those three places!