10th Anniversary Gift: Tin and a Song About a Decade

What a tin is for

Think of the cookie tin in your grandmother's cupboard that held buttons and spare keys instead of cookies. Tin is a humble metal, and that's its charm: a tin is where people put the things worth saving.

That makes it a natural partner for a song, which is also a way of keeping things. Ten years in, you're most likely giving this to each other, often around a trip or a dinner out, so think small and portable. Tin ideas that suit a decade:

• A small tin box with the lyrics inside. Print the song's lyric artwork at card size, fold it once and lay it on top. More on packing it below.
• A tin of ten notes. One folded note for each year, each naming a single thing you remember from it.
• An old tin from an antique shop. Look for one printed with the name of your state, a brand they love, or a design from the year you met.
• A punched-tin lantern for the porch or the table where you'll listen to the song together.

Why a decade needs choosing

The problem with ten years isn't finding memories. It's that you have hundreds, and a song has room for a handful. Try to fit the whole decade in and you get a list of dates and addresses that nobody feels.

The fix is to borrow the shape songs already have. Verses move a story forward and a chorus comes back. For a decade, that means three verses for three eras of your marriage, and a chorus for the one thing that stayed the same through all of them.

One note so the words don't get tangled. The quiz also asks you to choose an era, but that one sets the sound, a decade of music or Timeless. The eras in this guide are chapters of your marriage. For the sound, many couples at ten years like the music of the year they married, which for a 2016 wedding is the 2010s.

How to pick three eras for the verses

An era is a stretch of time with its own feel: a home, a schedule, a set of worries. By year ten you probably have more than three. This decision rule narrows them down:

1. List the turning points. Moves, new jobs, babies, a diagnosis, a dog, a year apart. Write them in order on one page.
2. Mark the stretches between them. Each stretch is an era. Give it a name you'd both recognize: the Denver years, the night-shift years, the two-under-two years.
3. Keep the beginning. The first era almost always makes the cut, because it's where the story starts.
4. Keep now. The last verse should sound like your life this year, so the song ends in the present.
5. Choose one middle era. Pick the stretch that changed you most as a couple, not the one with the best photos.
6. Give each era one image. Not a summary. The fold-out couch in Denver. The baby monitor on the kitchen counter. The porch you sit on now.

Say you married in a tiny apartment in Chicago, spent the middle years raising twins in a house with a dishwasher that never worked, and now spend Sunday mornings on a porch while the kids sleep in. Those are your three verses: Chicago, the dishwasher, the porch.

The chorus: what stayed the same

The chorus is the part your partner hears more than once, so it should hold the thing that never changed. That's harder to name than the eras, because it's been there so long you've stopped noticing it.

Questions that help you find it:

• What do they still do that they did on your first date?
• What do you say every night, or every time one of you leaves the house?
• Which song, place or meal has followed you through every era?
• What did they promise early on and keep without being reminded?
• What do you still argue about, happily, after ten years?

When you fill in the quiz, put the three eras in the memories, in order, with their images. Then put the constant in the dedication and say it's the part you'd most like the song to keep returning to. The clearer you are about what matters most, the closer the song lands.

Packing ten years into a tin

The tin turns a song into something you can hand over, and it travels well if you're celebrating away from home.

1. Fill it in layers. At the bottom, one small thing from each era if you have it: a key, a ticket stub, a photo-booth strip. On top, the folded lyric print.
2. Hand it over closed. Let them open the lid and unfold the print before they hear a note.
3. Then play the song. Keep it downloaded on your phone, so it plays on a hotel balcony with no signal as easily as at home.
4. Let it live somewhere visible. Back home, the tin goes on the dresser or a kitchen shelf, where it gets picked up and opened again.

If ten years means a vow renewal or a dinner with friends, give the tin privately first. The song can be played for everyone later, but the first listen belongs to the two of you.

Ten years, in one song

Bring your three eras and your constant. In about three minutes you'll tell us who it's for, pick Anniversary, describe your partner, add the memories and the dedication, and choose a genre, era and voice. We write their song from your answers, and it's delivered in hours, which helps if the trip snuck up on you.

Only Happy Tears songs come with lyric artwork with a scan-to-play code, so the card folded in the tin can play the song again whenever someone opens the lid. When your list is ready, start your tenth anniversary song.