Why the year should not be on it

The best marker of an occasion is the one still worth having when the date has passed. That rules out the obvious: the year across the front, the number, the job title, the school crest.

Those are what make an object look dated the following year, and dated objects migrate to drawers.

The test

Would this still make sense in five years, if nobody mentioned the occasion?

A photograph and what people said about it passes, because it is about the person rather than the event. "50" in gold does not, because the moment the fifty-first anniversary arrives the object is describing something that has stopped being true.

Why the number feels necessary and is not

The occasion is why you are buying, so it feels like the thing to record. But the occasion is already recorded — everybody at the party knows what it is for, and the recipient certainly does.

Putting it on the object is telling somebody something they already know, at the cost of the only property that makes an object survive: being about a person instead of a date.

Where the occasion should live instead

In the story, not on the face. A description that says the summer she turned eighty, in the blue cardigan, laughing at something Grandad said off to the left carries the occasion perfectly and does not date.

The specifics do the work the number was supposed to do, and they do it better — covered in why the small details are the whole thing.

What people do with dated objects

Not throw them away — that is not what happens, and it is why this is worth getting right. They keep them, in a box, with the cards.

An object that stops being current does not become offensive; it becomes archival. It moves off the wall and into storage, where it is looked at once every few years when somebody is clearing a cupboard.

The pieces that stay on walls are the ones that never announced which year they belonged to, so there is never a moment where keeping them up feels like leaving the decorations too long.

The exception, such as it is

A date can earn its place when the date is the subject rather than the label — a photograph of a wedding day where the point is that particular morning, not the anniversary being marked.

Even then it belongs in the text. The rule is not that dates are forbidden; it is that a date on the face of an object is a label, and labels expire.

How to commemorate a wedding anniversary covers the occasion where this comes up most.