5th Anniversary
Five years isn’t nothing. It’s reached a stage where the early, heady stuff has settled down and you’ve built something that actually means something. You really know each other now. The annoying habits, the inside jokes that require no context, the way your partner drinks their coffee without even thinking to ask how you like yours. It’s worth celebrating properly, not_default_with some half-hearted attempt you picked up in your lunch break because the date snuck up on you.
Wood is the traditional fifth anniversary gift. It’s either a wonderfully limiting guideline or a slightly confusing one depending on your point of view. We’re in the former camp. Wood is warm and long-lasting and artisan-in-a-way-that-really-matters kind of craft led, which gives things a genuinely thought-about feeling that you just don’t get from jumping down the platinum route. So we leaned into it rather than tried to snub it, finding makers who cared about the craft and pieces that elevate it beyond just picking a material at random.
We didn’t want to limit ourselves entirely though. Some of these picks buck tradition just enough that they still feel right for celebrating five years. By that point you’re not buying for some random person you’ve been dating. You know them. You know their loves, the things they’ve been wanting for ages, what would make them stop and feel truly seen. We wanted this selection to help with that. Proper gifts for proper couples. Nothing glazed over and generic just sitting on a shelf with a roman five plastered on it.
Everything in this list passed the test we apply to everything we write about on this site. Would we gift this to ourselves? Would we give it to someone we loved and cared about for a milestone that mattered? If the answer was no then it didn’t make the cut. What you’ve got left is a list of things we would actually buy from. Be it our partner, a pair of friends, a sibling and their significant other, or anyone else celebrating five years together.⠀
Five years is worth celebrating. We think this is a damn good place to start.