Wedding Anniversary Traditions-New & Old

Your wedding day is just the beginning of celebrating your love. Each wedding anniversary is a time to celebrate your love with each other and reminisce on the happiest days of your life and years to come. This post will give you some ideas for ways to celebrate with wedding anniversary traditions that are both new and old.

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Follow Tradition

Make celebrating your special day a priority. There are many traditional ways to celebrate your wedding anniversary. There’s no excuse to not celebrate when tradition gives you ideas on ways you can celebrate.

Anniversary Gifts By Year

Your first wedding anniversary is known as your paper anniversary. Paper is represented as a clean slate and new beginnings together to write your own story. Paper is also fragile and can be easily ripped and torn, symbolizing the delicacy of one year of marriage. Exchange a paper gift for your first year of marriage. Check out this post of paper anniversary gift ideas.

Each year has a different traditional anniversary gift that you can follow. Here are a list of the first 25:

Photo credit: Madisun Paige Photography

It’s tradition to save the top tier of your wedding cake and freeze it to then eat on your first year wedding anniversary. While I can’t say the cake tasted the same as it did a year prior, it wasn’t terrible. If you’re not into eating a cake a year later, you could still celebrate with a cake each year. Get one from your cake vendor if you can or the same flavor as your wedding cake.

Make Your Own Tradition

Your first year wedding anniversary is probably the most exciting. Set the bar high with making new traditions for each other. There’s no limit to celebrating your love and each other on a day that was so important to you.

Watch Wedding Video

If you had a videographer, watching your wedding video again is a great way to celebrate. Our videographer actually reached out to us when they were cleaning out their storage and offered us raw footage from our wedding day. We waited for our one year anniversary to watch it together. It was funny to see all of the clips that didn’t make our wedding video.

Capture Each Anniversary With a Photo

Let sparks fly and take a picture with a sparkler. We got this idea from having so many sparklers left over from our wedding. It was so fun to take a picture like this a year later. We plan on adding a sparkler each year. Your photo doesn’t have to have a sparkler though. Just take a picture together each year and watch yourselves grow old together.

Journal

Take time to reflect on the year you had together. Write down your favorite memories, accomplishments and places you’ve traveled for the past year. Re-read your past journal entries from the year prior. Reflecting is a great way to celebrate each other and the things you’ve done as a couple. Get a printable marriage journal here.

Re-read Your Vows

Writing your vows in a vow book is a great wedding keepsake and a great way to keep them in a safe place. Pull them out each anniversary and read them again to remind each other of the promises you made to each other on your wedding day.

Put On Your Dress

If you still have your dress laying around your closet, put it on and feel like a bride again! I loved my dress too much to keep it in my closet and I had it preserved. If you’re looking for ideas on what to do with your wedding dress, check out this post.

Date Night

Above all, take the time to celebrate with some type of date night, whether that be going out to your favorite restaurant, ordering pizza, going for a walk on the beach. Make it your priority to celebrate your wedding anniversary together. If you want, repeat the same date night each year if you don’t want to reinvent the wheel.