The best wedding present ever?
At our wedding back in 2009, our friends Dave and Ann Mary toasted us with a surprise “wedding memory box” – a pretty decorated document box with a slit cut in the top where guests could slip notes, poems, quotes, drawing, jokes, or anything else they wanted to share with us, for us to open on our first anniversary. It was beautiful to look at so we kept it in our living room, and looked forward to opening it and discovering what our family and friends had written to us on our wedding night.
For our anniversary weekend, we carefully packed the wedding memory box, the wedding album I made using My Publisher, an expensive bottle of champagne that had been given to us as a wedding gift, and the two champagne flutes Brian bought for the ten-course meal he made me the night he proposed. We drove up to Vermont for the weekend and spent our anniversary night at a quiet bed & breakfast with candles in the fireplace.
We took a long walk down memory lane that night, enjoying that delicious champagne the whole way. First we paged through our photo album (our gorgeous wedding photos were taken by our talented friend and neighbor Matthew Sussman). Then we untied the ribbon, opened the memory box, and took turns selecting one note at a time and read them to each other. Some made us laugh, some made us cry, and a few weren’t entirely coherent…perhaps our guests had enjoyed a few glasses of champagne themselves by the time they wrote these notes?!
Reading the notes brought us right back to that amazing feeling of love, warmth, connection, and support we felt on our wedding night, and we decided we would re-open the box every year on our anniversary to always keep those feelings alive. Thanks to Dave and Ann Mary for the wonderful gift of capturing the feeling of our wedding night in a box that we can re-visit forever.
And here it is after a 30 minutes of fun arts & crafts! It’s hard to tell from these photos, but all four sides of the box lid are “bejeweled” with the turquoise gems. The bride & groom’s names are written on the label and the top of the box says “open 8.22.2012” which will be their first anniversary.
Altogether, this project cost about $10 and took 30 minutes to assemble. $10 and 30 minutes which will result in immeasurable joy, love, emotion, and memories for the special couple on their first anniversary. The best wedding present ever! Congratulations and best wishes to the happy couple.