#6

Another Bulk Barn purchase.  Cath loves Reese’s peanut butter cups.  She likes the thins even more.  This was a little easier than a 20-song playlist.

#7

So…Cath is a secret smoker…shhh.  I wanted to find a nice cigarette case and put in 20 smokes.  Hard thing to find in 2024.  So, I made due.  If found a plastic crayon case at the dollar store, put 20 cigarettes in it and wrapped it up.

#8

This was an odd one.  I was rummaging through the aisles at a local surplus store and they had a giant box of random books of matches.  The reason this one was appropriate was when Cath and I got married, we had custom matchbooks printed and placed at the table settings for our guests.  I picked through and found 20 random packs of matches, threw them in one of the gift bags and away we go.

#9

Cath is a fan of scratch off lotter tickets.  Twenty $2 tickets was an easy one, but definitely one she’d appreciate – and heck with some luck maybe we win enough to pay for our anniversary!

#10

One of our all-time favourite activities is walking the beach at our cottage and searching for treasure – aka beach glass.  We’ve been collecting beach glass since our 2nd date in 1995 when Cath took me to her cottage.  We’ve got a giant box of it at home.  So, I put on my creative hat and thought of something I could do with 20 pieces of beach glass.  I found a shadow box and some white poster paper at the dollar store then broke into the treasure box and picked out 20 pieces of glass.  5 pieces of 4 different colors and arranged the glass to spell out the word ‘LOVE’.  A few burns on my fingertips later while figuring out the glue gun and I completed gift #10.

Break

I didn’t just plan on giving her 20 gifts, I figured I should be making a plan to take Cath out for the evening.  Heck it’s not just our anniversary but it is New Year’s eve after all.  I decided that since we met in London, Ontario while at university, I’d book us a hotel in London and try to plan an evening out.  Unfortunately, the bar where we met, ‘Call the Office’ is no longer there and is all boarded up.  A search of activities going on in London resulted in a few nightclubs, which really wouldn’t be the right choice.  There was as show at Yuk Yuk’s but after a bit of time on YouTube watching the headliner’s top clips I quickly threw that idea away.  Then I found that the racetrack at the Western Fair was doing a New Year’s dinner, racing and dancing event.  Cath has always been a big fan of the horses, so I booked us in for an evening at the races.  More on that later!

#11

Another of Cath’s favourite treats are Icy Squares, the smooth foil-wrapped chocolate squares (definitely a few types of chocolate on this gift list).  Another Bulk Barn purchase to check off another item on list.

#12

Ok this is a weird one, but I was stretching the gift list a bit.  While strolling the aisles of the surplus store for gift ideas I saw a bag of rubber elastic bands.  Not really a romantic gift, however my thought was how Cath really is the one who keeps everything in our family together and organized.  20 rubber bands to signify this special quality of hers.

#13

If you know Cath, you know she’s got only a few vices.  The top of that list is an addiction to tea.  Specifically steeped tea from Tim Horton’s.  20 Tim’s steeped tea K-Cups and gift #13 was ready to go.

#14

Another odd one.  20 Fortune cookies courtesy of Bulk Barn (great store if you’re looking for multiple items of multiple things!).  Why fortune cookies?  Well who doesn’t like getting a fortune, but during a family trip to San Francisco in 2022, we visited the Fortune Cookie factory.  I thought the fortune cookies served up a nice reminder of one of the great family trips we’ve taken over the years

#15

Photos.  A few years ago, I went through the painstaking task of organizing all our photos – scanned the old, old ones that were still actual pictures, sorted through the various .jpgs from the multitude of SD cards from old digital cameras, plus organized all the ones from our combined Apple devices.  I created a library of photos organized by people and places.  My first idea was to try to find 20 photos of the two of us together from each year we were married.  After an hour of digging through folders of photos without proper dates or labels I gave up on that idea.  I ended up finding 20 different photos of the two of us together dating back from when we first started dating.  I organized all the photos into a photo collage, grabbed an 8x10 photo frame and printed it out and framed it.

Break #2

After creating the photo collage, I came up with another bright idea.  I decided to print out another copy of these photos, print them and cut them into individuals to use as gift cards for each of the 20 gifts.  On the back of each photo, I wrote a note explaining why each gift was chosen just for her, without giving away exactly what the gift was.  Seemed like a nice touch!

#16

Another random surplus store idea.  20 playing dice.  Why?  Well, we definitely like playing board games at the cottage, including Yahtzee and Shut-The-Box, but I also had the thought about how grateful I am that she gambled her future by agreeing to marry me all those years ago.  Seemed like an appropriate gift!

#17

Yet another idea found within the rows of the surplus store.  Candles.  Who doesn’t like a scented candle.  Why the surplus store?  Because I needed 20 of them!  Have you tried to buy candles from a regular store?  $40 for a single candle?  Seriously!??!

#18

Ok, this was the gift idea that inspired this entire idea of 20 gifts of 20 things for 20 years.  One of Cath’s eccentricities is that she loves a specific kind of potato chip.  She likes multiple flavors, but the chip she reveres is the ‘folded chip’.  That chip that during the processing gets folded before it gets fried.  Now in a normal bag of chips there’s only a few of these special chips.  I thought wouldn’t it be cool to give Cath a gift of nothing but ‘foldy chips’.  Light-bulb goes off – idea for a gift.  With our 20th wedding anniversary coming up, I think to myself that I should pull out 20 foldy chips and create her a special bag of chips!  This was the catalyst of ‘what are 20 things that are uniquely Catherine’ gift list.  So, I buy a big bag of Sour Cream ‘n Onion Lay’s – dump it out and start picking through to find the foldy ones.  After going through the whole bag there was only 11.  Damn it.  Back to Walmart, another bag of Lay’s, dump it out and pick through to find the other 9.  There was exactly 9 in that bag.  I put the 20 foldies together in a bag and gift #18 (really gift #1) is ready to go.  (and a whole bunch of leftover sour cream & onions for the kids).

#19

Another chocolate treat.  Cath has always liked Lindor chocolates (who doesn’t), specifically the balls.  For her, specifically the dark chocolate ones.  There happens to be a Lindor store at one of the local malls, so I went in so I could buy 20 single dark chocolate balls.  I go to the cashier with my selection, and she tells me that’ll be $30, but if I want to pick 100, it’s only $42 for the 100.  Seems like a no-brainer.  Now I have 80 extra Lindor’s sitting in my garage for a future occasion, I guess!

#20

I like traditions.  The traditional anniversary gift for a 20th anniversary is china.  Cath does have a small china doll collection handed down from her grandmother, but I wasn’t about to buy 20 china dolls.  At first, I thought maybe I could find 20 small china figurines.  Not so easy to find.  However, as I was sorting through the beach glass treasure collection, I was reminded that the other treasure we find washed up on the beach is broken pieces of china.  We actually had a pretty solid collection of china pieces.  Another shadow box, a piece of black poster paper, the glue gun and 20 pieces of china and gift #20 was complete!

Presenting the Gifts

As I mentioned, I turned our 20 photos into 20 personalized gift tags for each of the 20 gifts.  But how to present 20 gifts?  Especially since a bunch of them were in the same small gift bags?  Well, when I proposed to Cath 20 years ago, I made her a scavenger hunt in our then brand-new house.  I gave her a list of 20 hints which eventually ended with her finding her engagement ring.  I figured why not a repeat.  So, I made up a new scavenger hunt list, each with a quasi-cryptic clue and hid the 20 gifts around the house for her to find. 

The Day of

I also of course bought a simple punny anniversary card (Cath loves a good pun), and in it included a note telling her to pack a bag and a dress for our evening out that I had not shared with her and the scavenger hunt list. 

Cath went around the house, found her gifts and then we got in the car for our drive to London.  I didn’t share the destination or our evening plans until we got there.  When we got to the raceway, Cath was definitely excited to bet on the horses and it was shaping up to be a great night.  The Western Fair raceway has a decent dining area for watching the horse races.  Dinner wasn’t our favourite – neither of us are big buffet people.  The buffet was not great, but the salmon was edible and we didn’t starve.  We bet on each race, rather unsuccessfully.  In fact, only one of our bets actually paid – a whopping win of $13.  Of course, when you place your bets strictly on the names of horses, you don’t expect to win. 

After dinner, we were escorted to the hall that had been organized for the ‘New Year’s Dance Party’.  Ok, so this was a fail.  The hall itself was a boring mulit-use event hall.  The decorations were weak.  There was a projected powerpoint slide on the wall with a static picture of some fireworks with a counter in small boring font counting down to midnight.  The lighting was set up to remind one of a party room for a 11-year old’s birthday party.  The DJ was playing dance tunes for the mixed crowd of 40-60 year olds that no one knew.  Every once in a while, a group of 3 or 4 ladies would go to the dance floor, dance with their small group and return to their table.  As we were there on our own, we did join a table with a group of 3 other couples.  It seemed like the 3 ladies were related, however the entire time we stayed the husbands didn’t say a word.  Not to us, not to their wives, not to each other.  They just sat in silence, quietly sipping on their beers.  Cath and I toughed it out for about 45 minutes before giving up on our ‘dance party’ and decided to head for the casino at the raceway – at least they were playing good music.  After the slots ate our remaining cash within 7 minutes, we walked around the casino, which for some reason someone decided needed to be at 92 degrees until we could count down to the new year. 

Hey, not everything can be amazing, but we still made it memorable.