Every year we celebrate our anniversaries with little traditions and special activities: recreating our wedding menu, taking day trips near meaningful spots, cooking a favorite honeymoon meal, or even taking a big trip like going to Hawaii. This year we kept up several long-standing traditions — including our annual family photo — and added a few new moments, like showing our wedding video to Clara for the first time.
It was a little funny to watch the video on John’s old camcorder since it’s the only way we had to play it. We hadn’t watched the wedding tape in years, so several scenes surprised us and made us laugh. Clara enjoyed spotting her cousins as kids and loved Burger’s brief cameo. It was a sweet, nostalgic moment for all of us.
One wedding planning regret we still joke about is never having a formal cake tasting. Our backyard wedding featured delicious Ukrop’s cupcakes, but we missed the experience of sampling multiple cake flavors, frostings, and fillings before the big day. Then John surprised me with a late, but thoughtful, solution: he arranged a belated cake tasting with a local baker, just for us.
Instead of a full cake, the baker prepared cupcakes so we could sample several flavors — essentially combining the fun of our original cupcakes with the cake-tasting experience we never had. John considered picking the flavors as a surprise but decided it would be more enjoyable to choose them together, like we would have while planning our wedding. On our anniversary he told me about the plan and later that week we tried the samples that Amanda at Sweet Fix had made.
Choosing flavors was hard because there were so many tempting options. We finally settled on four: chocolate with peanut butter buttercream, princess white with green tea buttercream (princess white is similar to angel-food cake and was John’s favorite), almond with maple buttercream (my favorite — it reminded me of a gourmet waffle), and vanilla with strawberry jam filling and strawberry buttercream (Clara’s pick).
We each sampled every flavor, took home a box of extras to share with friends, and left with a slightly imperfect family photo courtesy of our blur-prone pup. Teddy was just inspecting the samples during the shoot.
We also keep an annual photo and a photostrip from the day itself. On our anniversary we visited the New York Deli, known for its old-fashioned photobooth in the back. The results were predictably inconsistent: some years the prints are crisp, other years they’re dark or spotty. This year’s strips turned out ghostly, which gave us a good laugh.
We appreciate those quirky photobooth quirks, and if locals know of other real photobooths in RVA we’d love to hear about them. Despite the less-than-perfect strips, we did manage to take one solid family photo on the seventh using a tripod and camera remote. We tried to include Burger but he opted out — he refuses to pose for our annual shots. Teddy still needs work on looking at the camera, but Clara wasn’t blurry this year, which felt like a small victory. She even incorporated her 4th of July temporary tattoo into the shot.
In our previous house we displayed our anniversary photos around the bathroom mirror, and seeing those yearly images again inspired us to hang them here. We used a narrow wall in the sink nook off our bedroom so the photos are visible every day. They’re arranged chronologically, starting with our first anniversary and moving top-to-bottom in each column. Having them up made me realize how much I missed that annual visual record.
We ended our anniversary celebrations with a cozy dinner at Wild Ginger. Clara spent the evening with Grammy and Tom Tom at a cousin’s swim meet, and we brought Teddy along because we figured he’d sleep — which didn’t happen, but he made a very cute third wheel.
Seven years of marriage, seven years of anniversary traditions, and seven years of sharing our celebrations here. We love keeping these rituals alive — the little moments and the small adventures make each year meaningful. What traditions do you have for your anniversaries? Day trips, special dinners, or dessert tastings?