How Romantic Is This $5 Gift?

Before we married, I had a dulcimer handmade for myself and learned to play. Fastforward a few years to when a husband and 2 kids are around and I decided to sell the dulcimer at a garage sale since I no longer had the time to play. Immediate seller’s remorse set in. Fastforward yet again to when we started attending a small-town church with the woman who remembered buying the dulcimer from me and told my husband that she still had it. On Christmas that year when he placed that dulcimer under the Christmas tree after buying it back for me, I cried like a baby.

On my 36th birthday, I was seven months pregnant with my first child. The night before my birthday, I was sitting on the sofa watching TV in a bathrobe when my husband handed me a beautiful piece of blue silky fabric, which turned out to be an elegant (stretchy!) evening gown. I hadn’t worn anything that truly fit me, or made me feel beautiful, in months.

“You have then minutes to get ready,” he said, before driving the two of us across town to dinner at one of our city’s coolest new restaurants that he knew I’d been dying to visit (and where the waiter nervously asked if I wanted to skip a dish that was heavy on ginger, which can apparently induce contractions. It was delicious.) We had a perfect date, and were treated like royalty the whole night.

The next morning, on my actual birthday (Saturday), he handed me another little pile of fabric – a summery white slip dress with brightly colored flowers – and then walked me to one of our favourite local cafes that sits on a sunny square, where we had big milky coffees and talked excitedly about becoming parents as young children chased and splashed each other in the water playground right next to us.

Afterwards, I went to my pre-natal yoga class. Instead of driving me home, my best friend (also heavily pregnant!) told me she had another surprise for me, and drove me to a beautiful nearby lake that my husband knows I love. In the outdoor beer garden (we were living in Germany at the time), my husband had assembled my six closest friends along with their husbands and kids to toast to my birthday and enjoy the sunny day on the water. I felt loved, happy and beautiful.

My husband gets so excited planning and giving gifts, and he has given me many memorable surprises – but I remember this one in particular as a day of pure joy.

My husband and I have a framed menu from the famous Chez Panisse hanging in our kitchen! We went there years ago, and probably won’t have the chance to go again anytime soon (we live in NY) but it cost us almost nothing and is a lovely reminder of the best meal we ever had together.

I’m loving the comments on this article. Such good ideas here, and also such comfort for those of us with gift-giving-impaired spouses. I long ago gave up on trying to even give my husband gift ideas, because he just doesn’t follow through or remember properly. (I told him I love pistachios; he bought me almonds. I told him I love houseplants; he buys me flowers — and ugly ones. Think: Artificially colored blue carnations and the like. When I’m trying to lose weight, he buys me chocolate–and always milk chocolate, even though I prefer dark. You get the picture. These days, I just buy myself something I want and tell him what he “got” me. Sigh.)
But some things I love to give people are framed/frame-able pretty maps of places that have meaning to the receiver (and sometimes the giver, too), children’s books that are apropos to a certain situation or person (Dr. Seuss often works, and Frog and Toad), funny socks, their favorite food items (hot sauce, gummy worms, nuts, whatever), and houseplants.

Our first year of marriage we were young and hardly making ends meet financially. But for our first anniversary my husband gave the most incredible gift (it made me cry)! It was a small brown box tied with cooking twine (he was a chef). Inside was a note that said “for all the years ahead” and was filled with little things. A few packages of seeds “to start a garden”. A piece of stationary that had two columns simply reading “boys names | girls names”. A few empty London metro cards “for a trip”, and other wonderful things that were precursors to beautiful events in our future. It was the most romantic and beautiful gift I will ever receive.

My husband’s aunt and uncle have framed several menus from restaurants around the world where they shared special meals together. They hang them in their kitchen along with plates that they were able to purchase from some of the restaurants. A few years ago, my husband and I got married in their beautiful backyard and as a thank you gift, we framed the menu from the evening. It still hangs in their kitchen and it is a great reminder of that wonderful night!

Totally stealing this idea because my husband and I were MARRIED at Frankie’s 10 years ago!

Love the idea!

My grandparents ran a restaurant for one year in the 1940s (about 2 miles from where I live.) A few years ago my cousin gave us a framed menu from their spot. We proudly display it on our kitchen wall!

Because my husband has turned me on to so much good music over the years, I wanted to find new-to-us music to gift him on our 10th wedding anniversary. I went to our local record shop, and with one of the clerks (props to Dario at Stinkweeds), found 10 CDs, each one from a different year of the previous decade, and all unknown to us at the time. My favs are Sharon Van Etten’s 2010, Courtney Barnett’s 2013 and Houndstooth’s 2015 albums. The last was actually the 11th as Dario strongly recommended it.

My husband gets very stressed about gift-giving, but probably the least expensive gift he ever gave me was the sweetest. We had just moved AND gone through a miscarriage, so I was feeling pretty melancholy about Christmas. When we had been packing to move, I was going through old cassette tapes, sad to get rid of them because I’m a sentimental sap, but knowing it was silly to hold onto them. I was particularly emotional about tossing my Debbie Gibson Out of the Blue tape — it had been one of my first, and she was my elementary school idol. But alas, I didn’t even have a tape deck to play it on anymore, so into the trash it went.

On Christmas morning, when I opened up my gift from my husband, I was stunned to see my Debbie Gibson tape mounted in a small shadowbox frame. He had seen how sad I was about throwing it away, so he dug it out of the trash for me. It was the most thoughtful, unexpected gesture. I see it every morning now on my dresser and it reminds me of my childhood, the hard time we went through after losing our first pregnancy, and how far we’ve come together since then (two children later).

I got engaged in front of our first apartment in NYC, too, and for our first anniversary I gave my husband not a menu, but a pile of the fortune teller fish that you get with dessert at our favorite restaurant, Mermaid Inn. Great minds!

For my 40th birthday, my husband made me a CD called Dawn’s American Life. In a spot-on Ira Glass voice, he called and interviewed everyone from my grandparents, to my high school boyfriend and high school best friend, and so many meaningful people in between. I have no idea how he found most of some of those people–this was 15 years ago! They told stories about me and he edited it and added fitting and very This-American-Life music. It’s hilarious and so sentimental to me–my grandparents are dead now, and I love that I can still hear their voices. It will always be the most beautiful thing anyone has ever done for me.

Whenever my husband and I are somewhere outdoorsy (a friend’s cottage, camping, etc), we look for little “treasures”, like super smooth stones or acorns, and give them to each other. we keep them on the window sill in our bedroom and treat them like precious gems. It’s the little stuff!

When we got engaged in 2015, my now-husband and I were living in Brooklyn. The night we got engaged, we stayed at the lovely Wythe Hotel in Willliamsburg (a surprise for me)! The hotel had very cute postcards with a drawing of the building on them for free in the lobby. Afterward, when I wanted something to commemorate that evening, I contacted the hotel management and they offered to enlarge a copy of the postcard for me for FREE into a poster! I gave the poster to my husband for his birthday that year. The next year, for our first anniversary, he had the poster framed as a gift to me and it now hangs in our living room. The gift that kept on giving, haha. We’ve since moved away from NYC and I love seeing that reminder every day.

Not a gift per se, but I kept a movie ticket stub from college, on my first date with the guy who turned into my husband. I didn’t mean to keep it on purpose. Rather, I knew he was the type of guy I’d want to marry. I had the stub for some reason and a year later found it in my drawer and kept it. Who knew that 22 years married, and 27 years together later I’d still have the stub? It’s been tucked safely into a memory book for years.

For those of you who are curious, it was the movie “The Addams Family” from 1991 with Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston, and Christopher Lloyd.

for my first anniversary with my partner, I made him a photo book of our year together. it started with shots of what we were both doing before we met, and included a couple screenshots of our early, butterfly-inducing texts, and a scan of the ticket from when we went to punxsutawney PA to see the groundhog come out on groundhog day. I’m a photographer, so there are plenty of “high quality” photos in there, but also goofy selfies and phone shots that only we would know the meaningfulness of, and some poems that we had read out to each other that I copied out by hand and scanned. I knew this is what I would do for our first anniversary for months, and I really built it up! I told him that it was going to be the best gift that he’d ever gotten in his life, haha, and I like to think I didn’t fall short of that! it’s one of our most treasured items and I’m looking forward to it becoming a tradition that we do together to reflect back on our year. year two is coming up soon!!

What a great story! Especially for the romance of it!
I’m not romantic with my sister (HA!) but I also framed fun stuff for her last year for her birthday. The original ticket to the Beatles concert in 1964! We went together of course and cried a little when she opened it. We were so young and impressionable. Sigh.

We have a framed poster from the festival we went to for our first date. It’s been so long ago I don’t actually remember when we got it – but the date was in 1992. Luckily local frame shops keep old posters from the festival because they are so beautiful and popular where we live. I love the constant reminder of that beautiful August summer night, listening to music and lying on a blanket and looking at the stars.

Here’s a link just in case anyone wants to see – there is a contest for the poster every year and almost all are really beautiful works of art.
https://sweetpeafestival.org/previous-posters/

The sweetest gift I ever received was from my best friend in junior high — I loved “The Wonder Years,” (still do), but we didn’t have cable at my house, so she taped 4 episodes off the TV to a VHS tape (stopping the recording at commercials), and gave it to me for Christmas. I haven’t owned a VHS player in years, but I still own the tape, always will.

A college boyfriend called my mother to get the recipe for one of my favorite comfort foods and then cooked it for me, at a time that I really needed that. The relationship was pretty crappy but it remains one of the best gifts I’ve gotten, 20 years later.

On my birthday this year, my boyfriend of 4 months had to leave before I woke up for a conference. When I got up, he had left me a music box he made, themed like a band I’d been listening to a lot at the time, programmed a song from the band into it, and had tickets in another city to see them. But the best part was he left a vintage postcard from that city in the box, and crossed out some of the old text to say the most beautiful words I’ve ever been told, “You arrived in my life and now I can’t imagine it without you. Come with me to Portland?”

The irony was I had just gotten divorced, and that band’s music was my break up album, though he didn’t know the musical significance. When we went to the concert a couple months later, I quietly cried through half the show, and it was incredibly poetic to re-hear these songs in such a different context and have them mean something so positive and different than they had the year before.

Every wedding anniversary my husband writes up something about our year together. It’s usually funny and light but very truthful. He adds the chapter to “our book” and gives it to me. It’s so thoughtful and I love reading what his perspective of our year was, while also revisiting all the highs and lows of our previous years together. I’d take his words over material gifts every time.

Such a sweet idea and story! And Frankie’s is the best…this just made me want that browned butter cavatelli. *drool*