diamond wedding - gift ideas

trailingspouse

My parents will be celebrating their Diamond (60 year) Wedding in a couple of weeks. The party itself is all organised, but I'm not sure what to get them as a gift. They have already said they don't want diamonds (which would be the easy, if expensive, answer!!). They are very active and in excellent health.

So - I'm looking for something a bit different (not chocolates, alcohol or flowers!), preferably a joint present. Help!!

lika_86

Weekend away?

p00hsticks

Has someone applied to get them a message from the Queen ?

https://www.gov.uk/get-birthday-anniversary-message-from-queen

Sandhy

My parents had their diamond a couple of years ago. We were also stuck for ideas. We ended up getting a personalised label for sticking on a gift-boxed champagne bottle. It was a label on eBay and you chose the wording and they sent you a proof for approval.

I made a diamond shaped cake.

Other family gifts included a grape vine ready for planting and a large photo frame with collection of all of us through the years.

A theatre gift card is another idea if they are interested in that kind of thing.

itzmee

How about a large canvas of their wedding photo? Or put together a load of photos/momentos in a 'This is your Life' style album?

TBagpuss

I would guess that they already have a lot of stuff, so I would try for something relatively small but personal.

Possibilities, depending on their taste:

- A photobook of their marriage. We haven't done one for my parents but my sister did one for my 40th, she borrowed and scanned / got copies of photos from a number of people including family and friends and had a book made up, with notes / captions. So some of the photos were ones I didn't have. For a wedding anniversary, you could try to get a few 'family tree' type pictures - e.g. copies of a couple of childhood photos for each of them, maybe a wedding picture or two (including a group photo, if you can) and then pictures from the course of their marriage. You could try get, and include, group photos of each family - e.g. one of you and your siblings, one of each set of grandchildren etc.

Another possibility, if the book can't be done in time, would be get a group photo of them and all the children, grandchildren etc - this might be a case of taking the photo at any party so the the actual gift at the time might be a suitable frame, or a hand-made voucher to say that the photo and cost of framing will be your gift.

Another possibility might be to provide a gift voucher for a really good quality restaurant or for a mini-break.

If they have a garden then you could buy a tree or bush for them - something significant based on the name of the plant, their favourite colours etc.

Another possibility would be to ask all the family and friends to write a short note sharing a memory or something they value about their relationship with your parents, and put all of them into a book. (get a nice quality notebook or journal, and you can either get people to write directly in it, or ask them to write on separate post-card sized cards or pieces of paper, and glue those in.

Serendipitious

Booked lunch on a steam train once as a special gift for my parents, wasn't for an anniversary but they really loved it as it wasn't something they would have thought about for themselves.

potatosan

How about ordering a commemorative marriage certificate?

According to the gov.uk website here are the details:

The original marriage details are printed on a specially designed certificate and mounted in a presentation box.
You’ll need to place your order at least 10 working days before the date you need it.
You’ll also need a debit or credit card to use this service.

https://www.gov.uk/commemorative-marriage-certificate

penguingirl

Similar to the photo album suggestion above, my brother and mum have both recently done albums for special birthdays where they asked all family and friends to take pictures of themselves with a banner saying 'happy Xxth birthday' and some also wrote some words about the person. They then got put into a photobook and came out really well. Although my brother also got some random people to do it for his fianc!e's and it confused her as she was trying to recognise them! Both took a lot of organising though and it depends how good you are on the computer.

Also we've done quite a few word clouds- I use the website tagul. You can do it in the shape of 60 or a diamond and include details like their names, where and when they got married, children's names, where they've lived etc. Put in a nice frame and it can be really effective.

trailingspouse

Some brilliant ideas - particularly the message from the Queen, didn't know you could do that for anything other than a 100th. Unfortunately we're too short on time (only 9 days to go, and the website says 3 weeks) - will bear it in mind for the 65th!!

Liking the 'diamond-shaped' cake idea - that should be doable. Will try to get some 60 balloons too.

They don't really have photos and such up around the house, but I love the 'this is your life' idea.

We bought them a tree for their Golden Wedding (the leaves turn golden in the autumn), it's still going strong - tempted to see if I can find something with diamond-shaped leaves!

hazyjo

Looked at 'notonthehighstreet' and filtered by 60th anniversary, low to high price, show all. Some lovely plant ideas with 'diamond' in their name. Ignore the stuff with diamonds in as know they didn't want that.

https://www.notonthehighstreet.com/gifts/shop-by-occasion/anniversary/by-year/60th-anniversary-diamond?utf8=%E2%9C%93&view=many&filter%5Bdelivery_zone%5D=1&filter%5Bsort%5D=price

Good luck x