Every year we celebrate our wedding anniversary with small rituals and special activities: recreating our wedding menu, taking a day trip near our engagement spot, cooking a favorite honeymoon dish, or sometimes taking a big trip to Hawaii. This year followed that tradition. We kept a few annual rituals (including the year-by-year photo that many of you asked about) and added some new moments, like showing our wedding video to Clara for the first time.
Watching the video turned out to be unexpectedly charming. The only playback option was John’s old camcorder, so we all gathered around its tiny screen, pressed play, and started laughing. We hadn’t watched the footage in years, so several small moments surprised and delighted us. Clara enjoyed seeing some cousins as kids instead of their current teen selves, and she loved Burger’s cameo. It felt like a sweet, nostalgic little trip down memory lane.
One thing we always joked about after our wedding planning was that we never had a proper cake tasting. While we were happy with the cupcakes from Ukrop’s at our backyard wedding, the idea of sitting down to sample a range of cake flavors, frostings, and fillings always seemed like the fun part of planning. We often laughed that two dessert lovers like us had missed out on that experience.
Then John surprised me with one of the most romantic gestures he’s ever done: he arranged a belated cake tasting. He coordinated with a local baker who agreed to prepare a selection for us at a reduced rate since we weren’t ordering a full wedding cake. The baker’s approach—serving cupcakes so we could sample multiple flavors—was perfect. It was like combining our original wedding cupcakes with a proper cake-tasting experience.
John considered choosing the flavors on his own to surprise me, but decided it would be more fun to pick them together, like we would have for our wedding. He told me about the plan on our anniversary, and at the end of the week Amanda at Sweet Fix had prepared a delicious lineup for us to taste.
Choosing flavors was surprisingly difficult because there were so many tempting options. In the end we settled on four: chocolate with peanut butter buttercream; princess white with green tea buttercream (princess white is similar to angel food cake and this was John’s favorite); almond with maple buttercream (my favorite, which tasted like a gourmet waffle); and vanilla with strawberry jam filling and strawberry buttercream (Clara’s pick). We each sampled all the flavors and took a box of extras home to share with friends.
We also came home with a playful, not-quite-perfect family photo—blurry, but full of character—thanks to Teddy’s constant motion. Teddy was more interested in the samples than the camera that day.
On the actual anniversary we try to take a family photo and get a photostrip, so we made our usual stop at the New York Deli, which has an old-fashioned photobooth in the back. The results were comical: the booth’s prints can be wildly inconsistent. Some years they are clear; other years dark and spotty. This time the prints made us look like a family of ghosts. The machine even had a sign warning patrons that prints may vary, which at least prepared us for the outcome.
Still, we managed to capture one decent family photo on the 7th using our tripod and the camera remote. We tried including Burger, but he opted out—he always seems baffled when we try to squeeze him into family portraits. Teddy is still learning to look at the camera and smile, while Clara, thankfully, stayed relatively still and even incorporated her 4th of July tattoo into the shot. Teddy might have been more fascinated by the tattoo than by the camera.
In our previous home we displayed all of our anniversary photos framed together by the bathroom mirror, so getting a fresh picture gave us the push we needed to hang our annual photos here. We used a narrow wall in the sink nook off our bedroom, a spot we pass at the start and end of each day. The collection begins with our first anniversary in the circle frame and continues chronologically from top to bottom in each column. Seeing those photos on the wall made me realize how much I missed them.
We tried to end our anniversary with a romantic dinner at Wild Ginger. Clara went with Grammy and Tom Tom to a cousin’s swim meet while we brought Teddy along, assuming he’d sleep through the evening. He didn’t sleep, but he made a charming third wheel at dinner.
So after seven years of marriage, cake tastings and all, we’re still keeping traditions—old and new—and enjoying the small rituals that mark our time together. We love hearing about other couples’ traditions: do you take day trips, plan special dinners, or treat yourselves to dessert binges to celebrate? Share the ways you mark the years together.