Every year we mark our anniversary with little traditions and special activities: recreating our wedding menu, revisiting our engagement spot for a day trip, cooking one of our favorite honeymoon dishes, or sometimes taking a big trip. This year we kept up several of those traditions—like our annual family photo—and added a few new moments, including showing our wedding video to Clara for the first time.
Watching the wedding video felt delightfully old-fashioned. The only playback option we had was John’s old camcorder, so we all crowded around its tiny screen and pressed play. We probably hadn’t watched the footage in five years, and a few long-forgotten moments had us laughing out loud. Clara enjoyed seeing her cousins as kids instead of teens, and she loved Burger’s brief cameo. It was a sweet, simple trip down memory lane that made the day feel especially warm.
One of our long-running regrets from the wedding planning days is that we never experienced a proper cake tasting. We loved the cupcakes we served at our backyard reception, but the idea of sitting at a table and sampling a lineup of cake flavors, frostings, and fillings always sounded like the most fun part of planning. So, this year John surprised me with a belated cake tasting—one of the most romantic gestures he’s done. He arranged for a local baker to prepare a selection of cupcakes so we could finally taste our way through the possibilities.
Instead of choosing the flavors entirely on his own, John invited me to pick them together, as we would have before the wedding. On our anniversary he told me about the plan, and a few days later we met with the baker to sample the treats she had prepared. She presented cupcakes as a tasting method, which felt perfect: a playful mix of our original wedding cupcakes and the cake-tasting experience we missed out on.
Deciding on flavors was challenging—there were so many tempting options—but we narrowed it down to four favorites. We sampled chocolate with peanut butter buttercream, princess white with green tea buttercream (princess white is similar to angel food cake and became John’s top pick), almond with maple buttercream (my personal favorite, which tasted like a gourmet waffle), and vanilla with strawberry jam filling and strawberry buttercream (Clara’s clear favorite). We each tried every flavor, and we took a box of extras home to enjoy and share.
We also captured a few family photos after the tasting, though one of them ended up less than stellar thanks to a slightly blurry moment—Teddy was inspecting the cupcakes and Lady Blurs-a-lot struck again. Teddy was simply curious about the treats, while Burger maintained his usual dignified distance from posed photos.
On our actual anniversary we kept another tradition: a photostrip and a family snapshot. We visited a local deli that still has an old-time photobooth in the back. The photobooth prints are notoriously unpredictable—some years they come out sharp and clear, other times they’re dark or spotty. This year the prints made us look a bit ghost-like, but we appreciated the machine’s character. The little sign on the booth even warns you about the variability, which makes every strip feel like a small, charming gamble.
We did manage to get one decent family photo using our tripod and the camera remote. Burger opted out of most posed shots—he seems to be an annual nonconformist when it comes to family photos—and Teddy is still learning the “look at the camera” thing. Clara, however, manages to stay relatively still and even incorporated a temporary Fourth of July tattoo into the photo, which gave the picture a playful, personal touch. With these photos in hand, we finally hung our annual anniversary pictures in our current home. We used a narrow strip of wall in the sink nook off the bedroom, arranging the frames chronologically so we can pass them each morning and night. Having those images back on the wall reminded me how much I enjoy seeing that visual record of our years together.
To cap off the celebration, we tried to enjoy a romantic dinner at a local restaurant called Wild Ginger. Clara spent the evening with Grammy and Tom Tom at her cousin’s swim meet, and we brought Teddy along because we assumed he would sleep. He didn’t end up sleeping, but he made for an adorable and unexpected third wheel.
Seven years of marriage feels like seven years of growing rituals: small celebrations, photo traditions, and shared treats that remind us why we wanted to mark this day every year. Whether it’s a day trip, a favorite meal, or a dessert-fueled tasting, those little rituals are how we keep making memories. What anniversary traditions do you celebrate—dinners, day trips, or maybe your own sweet tastings?