Mazel Tov! Hey, we should have a virtual anniversary party! Where would you want it? We can take the planning from there!

Wonderful! It takes a lot of work to have a relationship last that long. A virtual celebration sounds like just the thing.

Well as the sea and rivers have been so important in our lives I think we should commandeer an ocean liner - starting in Liverpool, around the Cornish and Channel coastlines, the Irish Sea (The Isle of Man) calling at Vigo, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, aroundnd the Med coastline (Greece, Northern Africa, Spain, France) overhe pond to Boston, Seattle, Vancouver.
How about inviting some suthors from those countries or maybe characters from plays and books - I think I;ll go as Cleopatra and my DH would be well in character as Capt Horatio Hornblower. Pass the seasick tablets!

Well done Jan; many congratulations!
We too were married in December, but less than 50 years ago and we were in thick fog all day!
Your virtual cruise sounds grand and travelling through the ether there will be no need of seasick pills.
May I sling my hammock 'tween decks' please?
The parrot is almost house-trained.

Oh, land in Maine as you come across the pond. We will commandeer the entire fleet of windjammers out of Camden and take a couple day sail up and down the coast. They can drop us off in Boston, where we will have some tea to warm us up, there are some fine tea shops in town. Several excellent bookstores can be found in Boston, not to mention the historical sites.

I am not a big fan of cruises, but if its a private one with just us on board, it should be grand. And I've always wanted to do the Mediterranian (I just can't spell it). DH will definitely go as Nelson, one of his heros, and Ill go as the Unsinkable Molly Brown, so we have enough money, and so we'll be safe.

Congratulations on a wonderful achievement. And best wishes for the next fifty!

Rosefolly

Congratulations, Jan, and many more.

So ye thought I were the only one, did ye? I comes from a long line o' women adventurers who dressed as men tae gain equal treatment. There be many more, but as they were ne'er unmasked, we'll ne'er know who they were. Pay tribute tae them that had the guts tae fight an' the blood-thirstiness tae kill for the right tae live as free as they wanted. (Unashamedly lifted from a site about Anne Bonney. I'm such a regular person that I thought changing into an adventuress for this trip would be a treat.)

Congrats Jan! I agree that it is an accomplishment in this day and age, especially. We are going on 35 and I'm glad we've stuck too even though it's not always easy. I'm not much for the water but the Mediterrianean(sp) could seriously tempt me. By the way, how do you spell it?

Congratulations, Jan! Fifty years, eh? Makes my twelve and a half look like child's play. 1956 - Suez crisis, Hungarian revolution, Elvis Presley. An eventful year!

Look, it's spelt Mediterranean. It's not that hard. It roughly means "in the middle of the land" as it was the sea in the middle of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, which was pretty well the whole known world about two thousand years ago.

I'd love to come on a cruise. Can I be Captain Hook?

Congratulations from another December bride (it was 36°C the day we got married nearly 27 years ago).

I would love to come on a cruise, would love to tour the Mediterranean, and I'm the daughter of a sailor (well, he was in the war) so sea sickness isn't a problem for me.

My congrats too, Jan. I can't imagine the wonder of 50 years with the same person. My marriage lasted only long enough--3 years--to produce a wonderful son, now 31 and a new daddy. I'm just so in awe of those who make relationships work.

Congratulations, Jan. 46 years here and there are still days when we wonder if we'll make it to 50...LOL

josh

Congratulations! Does Golden qualify you for a telegram from the Queen? It should. You should get a billboard in Piccadilly Circus.
We'll be thirty years in June-50 is an amazing combination of love, effort, compromise and the luck of health. My parents are married 52, my inlaws were separated by the death of my m-i-l during their 35th year of marriage-much too early.

Congratulations, Jankin! Speaking as one who 'pressed the reset button' after ten years of marriage, and is now halfway through year 2, I have great admiration for anyone who manages to find the right person on the first attempt!

I'm not a great one for sea voyages, especially as it was the Navy that finished off my first marriage... but a virtual cruise is much more appealing than a real one, as you can get off anytime anywhere, and the sea sickness isn't usually much of a problem either. Can we have a proper sailing ship?

Jan, I add my heart-felt congratulations to those of our friends. You and your husband are inspirations to the rest of us. Yesterday was our 13th anniversary, and as the years go by, I think of how our lives have changed - mortgage, kids, cars, dogs, houses, boats, next year's tomato crop, and it seems a wonder to behold what two people who've joined forces can accomplish.

Well done, Jan. And cheers to the simple life - of walks in your neighborhood, dinners out, and just being together.
PAM

Congratulations - happy anniversary!

It's always heartening to hear about people who have made it this far together.

Congratulations!!! We have always made it a habit of never celebrating or making plans until after 7:30pm on the aniversary date. That way, if it doesn't last, we wouldn't have wasted time planning. It will be 57 years in February.

If you can order some nice warm sun, I'd love to join the cruise. Just stop by at the Marina down the street and pick me up please.
Aggie.

Congratulations!

Party! Party! Party! Ok, I'll bring the rum -- after all, if we're having a pirate themed cruise, we NEED rum! Good Jamaican rum...... heck, we might even go for some grog!

It's nice to hear about people who stay together, through thick and thin, and even through kids! :-)

It gives hope to the rest of us. (Well, the rest of you who are married. ;-) )

Are the women going to have to wear those sultry dresses like you see in the pirate movies? You know the kind, teensy, tiny waists and tops that make you wonder if they use thumb tacks to hold them up.

Since it's going to be a cyberparty, I'll be able to wear one. I'll have one of those beauty spots right about...there!

Anyanka,I love the expression "pressed the reset button." We did that 25 years ago, so second-time-around is far the best for me; although, as laceyvail said, I did get a wonderful daughter out of the first attempt.

Jankin, congratulations! Fifty is quite an accomplishment. We just had our 14th anniversary in November, and it seems like the time has gone by in a blink.

I'm a great fan of cruises and a proper sail around the Mediterranean sounds like the perfect way to mark such a grand occasion.

Ahem!!! Lovely to see everybody and come dressed as you will, see below for how I'll appear!!!! Not a barge but perhaps QE2.
I realise I'll have some competition from Ann Bonney and her ilk - Agnes can you give us a clue - will you be looking like Madame Pompadour?
"The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
OÂerpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did."

Many thanks for all the good wishes and to everyone else single or partnered in any way may you have many causes for celebration in your lives.

It still seems unreal. We were so young - I, just a two months short of my 19th birthday and my DH 21 and a bit - veryone said it wouldn't last ( and we often agreed over the years). The song of the times was Johnny Ray's 'They Try to Tell Us We're Too Young" - soppy isn/t it?

My BIL is 12 years older than my big sis, and she was 21 at the time they got married. Everyone gave them 6 months at the top. 39 years and counting....

We just celebrated our 16th. I can't believe how fast it has all gone by. And yeah, that reset button should be given to all couples along with their marriage certificate!

The reset button has always been very useful except it always defaults to original setting - also one mustn't press the playback button by mistake - 'pause' is the one I use most often.

I think you should write a self-help marriage manual Anyanka - Do you have any othet tips - apart from closed order convents and monasteries.

I have to admit that I find the erase button to be useful; I think in fact that a lot of men have an automatic erase facility for anything over about six months. Unfortunately, women seem to have extremely reliable long-term storage and recovery facilities....!

No Jan it is you that should be writing the marriage guide! After 50 years there must be more positive than negative things you would say about the experience . . . and for all the bad times you can quote Henry V before Agincout ". . .then will I strip my sleeve and show my scars and say "These wounds I got on Crispin's Day"*
* a different 'day/s of choice' may be used here.

Cindy, I hope you are not serious when you say a 're-set' button should be given to all newly-weds!
Over here in the UK we are following the American lead in divorce plus re-marriage, in many cases for the slimmest of reasons.
I am old enough to put much of it down to the 'me' generation. You hear it all the time. "I want it all and I want it NOW" "I need MY own space" "He/she is cramping MY style" "I owe it to MYSELF to do MY own thing."

Jan interesting about the 'enclosed' monks/nuns.
On UK TV we had a series about 4 men 'entering' a monastery for a few weeks and trying to deal with their problems. This was followed by 4 women who stayed for several weeks with a group of Poor Clare nuns (a very srtict order).
The women were badly behaved, not bothering to respect the simplest of rules (not talking at certain periods and being 'on time' for services/instruction) and were over-emotional and totaly self-absorbed.
On the other hand the men (in a Benedictine monastery) seemed to obey the 'rules' but were fairly argumentative with oneanother.
I supppose the TV co. chose people who were likely to make sparks fly but the monks and nuns seemed far more balanced people. And they didn't seem to feel the 'need' of the opposite sex, although one nun said it would be nice to have a 'hug' now and then!

veer, when I was thinking reset button, I wasn't thinking divorce - I was thinking of something to bring us back, start over, retrieve the words spoken in anger, the pain given to each other. But now that you say that and I reread the posts, yeah, that is what it meant. Maybe an edit button would be more appropriate!

Congratulations, Jankin! And many happy returns of the day.

I'm game for a celebratory cruise and early December is my favorite time of year in the Caribbean. Any liner with a library, with a cyber cafe, and which serves tea at 4 would work for us.

I've a friend who actually enjoys spending a week or so at a monastary and getting up at 4 a.m. for prayers. She leaves muttering about cleansing her lawyer soul. Except the last time she was there, they asked her to take a case for them.

LOL!

Many convents and monaseries act as inns for travelers. There was one we were thinking about in France we might try. Could be very interesting.

I just hope that the suites on this cruise do not look like the one the Marx Brothers got (one of my favorite scenes in a movie)

Ha! I'm definitely not qualified to write self-help manuals on marriage - for a long time I would have been the one at the back of the church shouting 'Don't do it!'. And then, in my 40s, I finally found out why people get married! I hope we'll make it to the the Golden Anniversary like Jankin; I'll let you know the results in 2055.

Cindy, as Vee pointed out, I didn't mean 'reset' as in start all over again with the same person... but like Carolyn I have no regrets because of the two fabulous daughters. - I like the Marx Brothers cruise model, by the way. I'll go along with it, especially if we can get Capt Jack Sparrow on board too.

Many heartiest congratulations!

A wonderful milestone -- and always interesting to reflect on the current times and ideas about love and marriage!

We have been married for 25 years --- and the years really have slipped by ...... except in my mirror of course!! LOL!!

Again -- Well Done!!

from another Jan now here in Texas .....

Congratulations from me too, Jankin! A virtual cruise sounds like fun (although with winter conditions threatened for this weekend, a genuine Mediteranean cruise would really sit well with me right now!). My DH and I just celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary a few weeks ago and I can't believe it's already been that many years.

Again - thank you for all the lovely messages - we;ve had a lovely weekend - with cards and flowers from friends and family. Last Spring I managed to find one of my bridesmaids through genes reunited - and we met in August - after 46 years! She lives very close to my daughter in the Northwest (of the UK) so greetings from her were expecially appreciated,
The 1st December 1956 was a very cold but sunny day and snow began to fall as we entered the church - the weather was different on Friday 2006 - very warm, very dull, and it rained most the day - but actually I wouldn't have beebn anywhere else.
Still enjoying the idea of a made to measure cruise - the only cruise I;ve every been on was when my husband was working as Consultant Engineer to Carnival Cruise Lines out of Miami and somehow I managed to get the money together to join him and we sailed around the Caribbean (1972).
It was an experience!
Hope you've all found your sealegs.
love
Jan

Congrats, jankin! How fun that you found your bridesmaid.

DH and I will celebrate our 26th this month, and we still like each other. :)

To be honest, I wasn't too keen on the cruise idea until anyanka mentioned Jack Sparrow -- swoon. Count me in if Cap'n Jack's along for the ride.