Is it true you can ask for a card from the King for a diamond wedding anniversary?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYes, and it is one of the few genuinely pleasant pieces of officialdom left. Congratulatory messages are sent for the sixtieth wedding anniversary, the sixty-fifth, the seventieth and every year after that, as well as for a hundredth birthday. It is not automatic: somebody has to apply, usually a son, daughter or grandchild, there is a form, and evidence of the marriage is normally wanted, so it is worth starting well ahead of the date rather than in the week of it. One thing worth knowing if you are the one writing the card. If a message is coming, do not mention it in what you write, because the whole pleasure of it is being handed over on the day itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How do you write an anniversary card for a year in which nothing much happened?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYou write about the nothing. Anniversary cards go wrong when they reach for events, because most years do not supply any, and a card listing a holiday and a new boiler reads as a summary rather than a message. The material in an ordinary year is the routine: who gets up first, what he always says when the football is on, the fact that he has made the tea every single morning without once being asked to. Naming one small specific habit does more work than any grand statement, because it proves you were paying attention during the stretch when nothing was going on. Save the sweeping lines for the years that earn them, and let the quiet ones be about the quiet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We had a small register office wedding and no anniversary habits at all. Where do you start?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nStart with something repeatable, because a tradition is only something you have done twice. Couples who mark the day well usually settle on one fixed element and improvise around it: the same walk, the same meal cooked at home, the card handed over at breakfast rather than saved for the evening. Cards are the easiest habit to keep because they accumulate, and a drawer with a long run of them in it becomes the record of a marriage that nobody set out to write. It matters far less what you choose than whether it survives a bad year, a working weekday and a stretch when neither of you can be bothered. Anything that needs booking or planning tends not to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He will open the card with the children in the room. How much is too much?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWrite it so that a ten-year-old reading over his shoulder would find it boring. That is a lower bar than it sounds and it rules out very little: gratitude, a shared memory, a remark about the state of the garden and a plain statement that you would do it again all survive being read aloud by somebody small and unimpressed. What does not survive is anything that turns the moment into a performance, and anything the children could cheerfully repeat to a grandparent. If there is something private to say, it does not belong in a card that will stand on the shelf for a fortnight. Send that separately, in the middle of the day, where it gets read once by the right person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a second marriage. Do you count from the wedding, or from when you met?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nFrom the wedding, if only because you have to count from something and anything else needs explaining every year. Plenty of couples who were together a long time before marrying keep two dates, the anniversary proper and a private one nobody else marks, and that works perfectly well provided the traditional names stay attached to the official one. Where it gets awkward is the number itself, since a fifth anniversary after fifteen years together can feel like a serious undercount. The fix is to say so in the card rather than to fudge it. Put the wooden year and the real one in the same sentence and the joke more or less writes itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The anniversary card is the hardest one in the shop to write, because the man opening it already knows everything you might tell him. There’s no news to break and no achievement to mark; there’s only the year itself, and whether you can say something about it that’s true and not a repeat of last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":584,"featured_media":5830,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2958],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5827","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/584"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5828,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5827\/revisions\/5828"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5827"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=5827"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=5827"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghamname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=5827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}