What Anniversaries and Milestones Have You Celebrated?
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My meet-iversary with my husband was last week, and a good friend is turning 50 soon, which got me thinking about which birthdays feel the most momentous or necessary for celebration. So let's discuss! What anniversaries do you celebrate regularly — and what milestones have been the biggest cause for celebration (or ones you wish had been)?
What Anniversaries and Milestones I've Celebrated
For my own $.02:
Our Meetiversary: We do celebrate our meet-iversary every year, although it's mostly just an excuse for a nice dinner for just the two of us. For those of you wondering, a meet-iversary is the day you met your partner — I've always enjoyed celebrating it because unlike our wedding, it wasn't something that we picked, just a serendipitous, random event that blossomed into so much more.
Wedding Anniversary: We celebrate our wedding anniversary, usually with a day or two away for just us, although the trip may or may not occur on our actual anniversary. We generally completely ignore the themed gifts for each year, and we don't really get each other presents at all. But if we have a relatively large “fun” family- or home-related purchase, we feel more justified in spending money on it around our anniversary.
Milestone Anniversaries: I have really nice memories of our first wedding anniversary, even though it was pretty chill, with just us away at a lake for the weekend. The year of our 10th wedding anniversary we had a lot of other expensive trips already planned that year, so we decided to hold off until the following year… and then the pandemic hit. So our 15th will be big! Hopefully.
Birthdays: The kids' birthdays are always big affairs, but as adults we don't do much beyond a nice dinner out.
Milestone Birthdays: In terms of milestones I have a lot of memories celebrating my 21st birthday and 30th birthday with good friends, and I remember my husband's 30th. (I was 30 when we met, and he was just about to turn 28.) For my 40th, my husband tried to plan some nice things but then got sick with strep throat, so everything was scaled back or canceled. For my husband's 40th birthday we did just a night away but with a lot of planned activities (an architectural tour, and a ride in an antique speedboat, a fancy French dinner, a boozy brunch).
{related: here's our last discussion on how we've celebrate milestone birthdays}
Other People's Milestone Birthdays: I have some great memories of milestone birthdays, but especially Auntie M's 30th birthday where about five of her closest girlfriends met in Sedona, AZ, for a few days. In general, though, I don't celebrate my friends' milestone birthdays differently than I celebrate their regular birthdays, which is to say they get a text if they're far and possibly a drink or meal if they're close.
For other people in our family… My mother is a twin and I still remember their 40th birthdays. (It involved large black helium balloons with comical gravestones reading “OVER THE HILL,” and I often reflect on how my 40th didn't feel like that at all.) We had a lovely week away for my MIL's 70th birthday — well, minus the vacation horror stories.
Other milestone anniversaries: My parents' 50th wedding anniversary is coming up, and I think they would both be upset if we did do anything big to celebrate it. I always feel a bit bad that I don't regularly recognize the wedding anniversaries of friends where I was in the wedding as a bridesmaid. (I didn't really have bridesmaids myself so I'm not sure what's standard here!)
Other major life milestones (weddings, births): For weddings, I've generally stuck to the registry, but when my close friends give birth I tend to give them a lot of baby head cold stuff and other weird things related to the early days of parenting that they likely don't even know exist. (It's weird, but they get me.)
(Slightly related question: Do you wish your friends who are parents a happy Mother's Day or Father's Day? It always takes me aback, especially when it's a text from a friend who isn't a parent.)
We don't really celebrate school reunions — when those big milestone years come up my husband and I both shrug. (A bunch of his former frat brothers did try to arrange a big thing for their 20th reunion, but the pandemic interrupted it.) I went to my 10th high school anniversary and my 5th college reunion, both of which were fun but not particularly memorable.
There may have been jobs where I've celebrated my quitting or leaving for a year or two after the fact, but it's probably a good thing that I don't even remember details about which jobs or around which dates.
I have a little reminder come up on my calendar for the Corporette and CorporetteMoms birthdays, but my family and I don't generally celebrate them in any way. (People always seemed a bit nasty when I mentioned the anniversaries here on the blog, so I stopped, although for some reason that time of the year (late spring) is generally peak time for nasty comments in general.)
[related: ways to celebrate professional wins]
Readers, how about you — what dates do you celebrate regularly? How have you celebrated the big milestones, and what else do celebrate?
Stock photo via Stencil.
It varies so much, and just depends on what’s going on in our lives and the world. We spent a week in Bora Bora for our first wedding anniversary, went to a very famous restaurant for our second, and did basically nothing for our 10th this year, so we joke that our anniversary celebrations get worse every year (to be fair, we set the bar extremely high in the beginning!) But the arrival of kids and Covid were factors in that. We don’t normally mark our dating anniversary even privately.
My husband doesn’t care about his birthday. I like to take a trip over my birthday because I love to travel, and my early May birthday is a good time of year for travel in most parts of the world. That said, our biggest and most expensive May trips (Thailand, Italy) have not correlated with milestone years. We did a long weekend in Vegas just us for my 30th, and went nowhere for my 35th since it was 2020. I want my family to go on safari the year I turn 40, but it will almost certainly be later in the summer once kids are out of school and weather is better in southern Africa. With kids starting public school, we won’t be able to travel on my actual birthday anyway. I suppose I could go somewhere solo, but I would rather spend my birthday with my family, especially because my birthday is often on or near Mother’s Day.
I like the idea of taking trips with extended family and close friends to celebrate their milestones, but I’m a bit of a control freak about travel planning, and find it frustrating to have to go on trips I didn’t get any say in planning. My mom and I took a sailing trip in the Caribbean to celebrate her 70th (due to work schedules and weather it was several months after her actual birthday) and that was absolutely wonderful, but I had a lot of say in planning it. In contrast, we just went to an all-inclusive in Mexico to celebrate my in-laws 50th wedding anniversary and that was a disaster. I liked the idea of celebrating them and getting to spend time as an extended family, but their budget constraints meant we stayed in a terrible resort and it was really not an enjoyable week. I’m not inclined to travel with them again for this reason.
I really wanted to take a bucket list vacation to celebrate paying off our mortgage, but that happened during the height of Covid two years ago and since we’ve been comfortable traveling again we’ve been taking kind of a YOLO approach and spending a lot of money on travel generally, so I don’t see the need for a specific trip to celebrate at this point.
I wish my close friends who are moms Happy Mother’s Day, and I get a lot of Mother’s Day wishes myself due to my birthday being so close to Mother’s Day. My two best friends and I all became moms the same year, and I sent them flowers for our first Mother’s Day.
If you have these budgets, why not contribute to your in laws 50th? I mean, 50 years!! Mexico is not a high cost location so you could have avoided or salvaged the trip. I’m sad for them that that was their experience. It wouldn’t be surprising if they didn’t want to travel with you either.
Whoa, your comment is harsh. The trip was their idea and the resort was their choice, so I’m not sure why we’re being blamed for the resort being bad. And fwiw, my in-laws did not have a bad time! They were happy and enjoyed themselves. We did not.
I do take your point that we could have offered to pay for everyone if we cared about staying at a better resort, but there were siblings involved with similar budgets to my in-laws, so had we insisted on a luxury resort and footed the bill we would have been on the hook for four hotel rooms. We are affluent and can afford to spend $10k on a big vacation, but we simply cannot afford to spend $40k on hotel rooms for an entire extended family. That far exceeds our entire travel budget for a year. I also think they would have been extremely embarrassed about accepting financial assistance because we deemed their chosen resort not nice enough. To me (and I understand family cultures differ, but please trust me that I know mine), “upgrading” them because we find their choice of resort unacceptably cheap seems far ruder than simply putting on a happy face and going to their chosen resort, which is what we did.
I had this thought too…
You really don’t get that we might be able to afford one hotel room at an upscale resort but not four? That’s a pretty huge difference in terms of cost. And my in-laws chose the cheaper resort, wanted to stay there and were completely happy with the trip. Not everyone likes fancy resorts (they don’t want four course gourmet meals! they want to go to the buffet…) and even if we could have afforded it “upgrading” everyone to the resort of our choice would have been a very self-interested gift that they would have (correctly) seen as more about us than them. We got them a lovely, generous gift that was something they actually wanted and wasn’t a gift to ourselves in thin disguise. But please tell me more about what a monster daughter in law I am…
I am child-free, and do send Mother’s Day/Father’s Day texts. When you say taken aback I hope that’s in a good way!
Lol my mom always asks if I’ve texted various people for Mother’s Day/Fathers Day. I think it’s weird, and limit it to my own parents and grandparents (when I still had living grandparents). I have one friend with a kid and I think I wished her a happy first mothers day this year but her kid was like 6 weeks old then. I guess tbd, since most of my friends are still a few years away from having kids
Anniversaries are one of the few things I look forward to celebrating. My husband and I aren’t generally big gift people and we decided many years ago not to do birthday or Christmas gifts. Instead, we prefer to do something special together to celebrate those events. However, the one time a year we buy gifts for each other is for our anniversary. We decided to use the traditional gift list and we love it. I recommend starting this tradition to every newly-married couple. We have so much fun each year trying to find gifts that fit in with the category. We also have a book where we write down what we did for each anniversary and the gifts we bought.
This may out me, but not long before we got married, my husband took a big chance on a job that ended up paying off hugely for the start of our life together. On the one-year anniversary of his time there, we were newly married and I decided to use it as an excuse to make his favorite dinner. We’ve since observed Lasagna Day on each of his job anniversaries – we’re now on “New Lasagna Day” for the job he took last fall.
We also both keep up faithfully with celebrating our dating anniversary, and our first baby is actually due around that time next spring, which I am so delighted by.
I like to celebrate and mark special occasions to keep from getting lost in the tedium of everyday life. So my family birthdays and anniversaries get at the very least a nice dinner and everything ending in a 5 or zero gets a long weekend weekend or more if the person we are celebrating is up for it. (With the understanding that my mother would love a spa weekend while my father wants a steak dinner at home with sides that do not fit his diet plan; I do not force people who do not want to celebrate to do something.) My core group of law school friends tries to celebrate graduation every 5 years but that has gotten harder as people have moved and had children.
The odd one is that my family makes a big deal about the day I conceived my child. I needed medical intervention so we know the exact day and after trying for what felt like forever and having multiple disappointments, the successful procedure merits at the very least champagne and a fancy dinner. If we cannot get together, my parents have a very nice bottle of bubbly delivered to my house.
The conception celebration is so sweet.
That’s very sweet. Happy conception!
As a 35-year-old unmarried woman without kids I’m lucky to celebrate my birthday every year. It’s hard to even plan trips because most of my friends have kids and just have different priorities. I’ve always found it a bit frustrating that I’m constantly celebrating my friends – their engagements, their bachelorette parties, their weddings, the birth of their children – and I don’t get celebrated in the same way simply because I haven’t found someone to share my life with yet. Sorry, just venting.
I felt this A LOT. Now that I am a few years out of the weddings and first babies my frustrations / jealousies have eased. A few friends recently sent housewarming gifts which were totally unexpected and joyful to receive. But it sucks in general, working on celebrating myself, partner be dam – ed