20th Anniversary Gift: China and a Song for the Table

China, the plates you save for good

China is the traditional gift for the twentieth anniversary. Plenty of couples received a set as a wedding gift, used it on a handful of holidays, and have kept it in a cabinet ever since, waiting for an occasion good enough.

Twenty years is that occasion. China is also tougher than it looks. It's fired at high heat, which is why a set can survive two decades of holiday dinners and still look like a wedding present, chips and all. The plate your brother-in-law knocked off the counter one Thanksgiving is probably still in the stack.

At twenty years, the gift usually goes from one spouse to the other, though teenagers in the house often end up helping with the planning. A family that eats together can help set the table for it, too.

The table you built

By year twenty, a lot of your marriage has happened around one table. It might be the oak one from a neighbor's yard sale, refinished twice, with pen marks from a fourth-grade science project still in the grain. It might be three different tables in three different houses. Either way, the table makes a strong spine for a song, because everyone in the family can picture it.

Say your wife has made the same pot roast every Sunday for twenty years and still won't share the recipe. Say the kids fought over the seat by the window until the oldest left for college, and now nobody sits there. Details like those carry a song further than any line about twenty years of love.

Go around the table: prompts for the song

Picture your table, then answer each of these in a line or two.

• The first table. What you ate on in your first place together: a card table, a coffee table, the floor of an empty living room.
• The dish of the house. The meal made more often than any other, and who makes it.
• The holiday that went wrong. The burned turkey, the power cut, the year everyone had the flu and dinner was toast.
• The seats. Who sits where, and the chair that has always been theirs.
• After the kids go to bed. What happens at the table once the house is quiet: the bills, the tea, the conversations that ran past midnight.
• The extra chair. A parent who moved in, a friend who came for one dinner and kept coming, the kid's boyfriend who now carves the turkey.
• Who's at the table now. The people and the meal on an ordinary night this year.

Pick three or four that make you smile and one that makes you a little teary. Put them in the memories when you start the song, with the table itself named first.

Let the kitchen decide the sound: what plays while dinner cooks? Jazz suits a candlelit table, Country or Acoustic suits a Sunday-dinner family, and R&B suits a couple who slow dance between courses. The era you married in can sound like your first years at that table.

China ideas to set beside the song

• Your wedding china, out of the cabinet. Wash it, set the table with it, and use every piece, including the gravy boat nobody remembers owning.
• A replacement for the piece that broke. If a plate or cup from your pattern didn't make it to year twenty, track down a matching one and set it at their place. Searching for it is part of the gift.
• A serving platter for the dish of the house. The Sunday pot roast deserves its own platter. Have your wedding date painted on the underside.
• Two china mugs, if your table is busiest at breakfast and the two of you still drink your first coffee together.
• Their place setting, with the lyrics on the plate. Print the song's lyric artwork, a digital file you can size yourself, small enough to sit on a dinner plate, and tuck it under their napkin.

Playing the song at your anniversary dinner

The dinner is the gift's natural setting, so decide where the song falls in it before anyone sits down. A timeline for dinner at home:

1. Afternoon. Take the china out, wash it and set the table. If the kids are home, this is a good job to give them.
2. An hour before. Put the printed lyrics under their napkin. Save the song to your phone and test the speaker at the volume you'll use.
3. Dinner. Serve the dish of the house, or the meal from your wedding reception if you remember it.
4. Between dinner and dessert. Clear the plates, say one line, and press play. "China is the traditional gift for year twenty, and we've barely used ours. Tonight seemed like the night."
5. When it ends. Point them to the lyrics under their napkin and play it again, so they can read along.
6. Later. Prop the printed lyrics on the china cabinet, where the good plates live.

At a restaurant

Call when you book. Ask for a corner table or a quiet room, and check whether a song at low volume is fine. If a speaker isn't welcome, share one pair of earbuds across the table, one each, and watch their face while it plays.

With the kids at the table

Teenagers can make the moment better or more awkward. If they'll be moved, keep them there: it's a song about the family table, and they're in it. If they'll roll their eyes, let them set the table and head out, and play it for them at a later dinner.

Twenty years, served at your table

Bring your answers from around the table. It takes about three minutes to say who the song is for, pick Anniversary, tell us what your partner is like and add the table details as memories, along with a dedication. Then choose a genre, an era and a voice. We write their song from your answers.

Along with your Only Happy Tears song, you get lyric artwork with a scan-to-play code. Prop that print on the china cabinet afterward, and anyone at a future family dinner can scan it and hear the song about this table. It's free to start, too. When the table is set in your head, start your 20th anniversary song.