Willy Wonka, Tinfoil Hats, and a Lost Wedding Ring
Today is my 19th anniversary! Hooray! To celebrate, let’s play a quick round of trivia. What do you call your 25th wedding anniversary? The correct answer is your “silver anniversary!” (“Silver jubilee” would also be an acceptable answer.) Everybody guessed that one, right? It’s pretty simple. Okay, how about an even easier one? What do you call your 50th wedding anniversary? Your “golden anniversary.” Everybody knew that, too, right? All right, let’s try a harder question. What do you call your 20th wedding anniversary? Uhh, believe it or not, it’s supposedly called a “China anniversary.” Strange, huh? Okay, now, for the final round—and this one is really going to stretch the boundaries of your knowledge—here we go: What do you call your 19th wedding anniversary? The answer is: nothing. Not a thing. Last week, as I was preparing to celebrate our big day coming up on October 1st, I was surprised to discover that my being married to, caring for, and living with the same woman for nineteen years means absolutely nothing… and it isn’t even worth celebrating. Okay, of course, I don’t literally mean that it means nothing and that it’s not worth celebrating. But I am saying that, according to folklore on the internet, when I did extensive searching online last week to find out what magical milestone my 19th anniversary would have, I came up totally blank. In fact, believe it or not, those special kinds of dates stopped being counted at the 15-year mark—four years ago. That’s right: today, this special day after nineteen years of marriage, has no traditional name, theme, or gift. You may be shocked (as I was) to find out that during our first decade of marriage, without even knowing it, my wife and I breezed right past a bizarre list of special anniversaries we didn’t even know about: paper, cotton, leather, fruit, wood, sugar, copper, bronze, willow, and tin. Yep, those are, in order, the special anniversaries of your first ten years together. After those, we also weren’t aware that we passed our steel, silk, lace, ivory, and crystal anniversaries. Somehow, in the midst of our first decade and a half of living and loving, flirting, and fighting, we passed our fifteen-year mark right when… our culture stopped caring. Apparently, society has deemed the first fifteen years of marriage worthy of being called out separately and giving each year, individually, its own name, with specific gifts already pre-planned to make it that much easier for everybody to bless you with. But then, I guess, they get just bored and give up altogether. As far as I can recall, nobody has ever given my wife and me a gift of paper (that’s kind of cheap), leather (that’s creepy), sugar (that’s weird), or willow (what?) for an anniversary gift, and I’m okay with admitting that this doesn’t bother me at all. But how strange it is that just when we were getting to the really hard part of living together, deep in the trenches of parenting, when our lives were peaking in their level of unimaginable difficulty, right at the moment our marriage became old enough to get its driver’s license, people stop counting and it isn’t special anymore. That’s weird. Surely, I thought, there must be some kind of nickname or gift or theme for a 19th anniversary. Why wouldn’t there be? But no, after searching high and low, it’s a big fat zero. I felt like I was at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, asking for something I apparently don’t deserve, and now Mr. Wonka is shouting at me. “You get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir!” Wondering how this could be, I went to Grok, my favorite AI tool, and asked for a suggestion in the absence of an “official” version. Do you know what Grok suggested? Tinfoil. Huh? This is my tinfoil anniversary? Grok’s response: “For the 19th anniversary, which doesn't have a widely recognized traditional or modern gift, let's invent something that captures the awkwardness an
