The sacred One Year Anniversary Gift. Newlyweds spend weeks shopping for the perfect gift to mark the end of their first year… But not me. During the weeks approaching my One Year Anniversary I didn’t give gift selection a thought. Why? Because I started on my gift 365 days ago.

For our Anniversary my husband received 12 letters. One written each month during our first year of marriage.

12 months, 12 letters. I wrote about the good and the bad of each month, the smiles and the tears, the successes and the failures. I wrote about the places we went, books we read, the recipes that worked, and the ones that didn’t. I even wrote one letter in a foreign country. I documented the things that would indeed be forgotten if not written down.

Pictures of barns, berry pies, and bookshelves (all torn from old “Southern Living” magazines) were strategically taped to an envelope box, transforming it into a gift box.

Keeping this a secret from my husband was almost impossible. And I often doubted that my gift idea would be good enough.

My husband loved his gift.

There is only one problem: how will I top this for our Two Year Anniversary?

-Elizabeth