Gifts for her

Next month is our 10th wedding anniversary and I have begun the arduous task of shopping for a gift for Mrs. Wife. I say arduous because Mrs. Wife is very, very difficult to shop for. You see, Mrs. Wife doesn’t give a shit about material things. It’s pretty amazing, really. She believes that true, deep happiness doesn’t come with a designer label attached to it. An expensive car, an 8,000 square foot house and shoes as far as the eye can see are relatively meaningless to her. She is one of the most psychologically healthy people I have ever met.

While that makes married life a lot easier, it makes gift-giving nearly impossible. What do you get for the person who doesn’t really need much? She’s fine with a family hug and those are free.

I turned to my old friend the internet. I knew there were traditional gifts for each specific anniversary but I, being just a guy, had no idea what they were.

According the a number of different sites, there are now “traditional” gifts and “modern” gifts. Were you aware of that? The “traditional” 10-year anniversary gift is aluminum/tin. The “modern” gift is diamond.

Oh, really?

That’s a major upgrade. The “traditional” gift of a diamond doesn’t arrive until your 60th anniversary. Here’s what I think happened: A bunch of old hens were sitting around kvetching and decided that they deserved something more than just a piece of tin for putting up with his shit for 10 years, so they rewrote the rules and bumped diamond up 50 years. Does that sound plausible? Can you imagine a man or a group of men coming up with this?

[BTW, our anniversary is 9/11. Thanks, terrorists, for severely fucking up my city and putting a crimp in our anniversary. It’s like having your anniversary on Pearl Harbor Day or Kristallnacht.]