By Pash, founder of Adorely · Updated 8 September 2026 · 5 min read
Ask them one question before you book anything: do you want to be looked at. A silver jubilee planned by the children is almost always planned the way a wedding is planned, for the guests, and the couple have already had that day once. What most couples at twenty five have never had is an evening where they are not hosting.
The answer decides everything else. Below are twelve ideas for either version, including what to do with silver beyond buying more of it, the honest position on renewing vows, and the part of the planning that has to start months early because it cannot be bought late.
Not "shall we do something", which everybody answers politely. Ask directly whether they want a hall and a guest list, or eight people and a long dinner. Plenty of couples at twenty five want the first and will say so happily. The ones who want the second usually say it once, quietly, and then go along with whatever is booked.
The single thing that makes a silver jubilee different from every other event in their lives is that for once they are not running it. No greeting people at the door, no checking on the caterer, no settling anything. Twenty five years of hosting is precisely the habit this evening exists to interrupt, and it only works if somebody else genuinely takes over.
Twenty five years on, the guest list has scattered and some of it is gone. Tracking down the ones still around, even only for a message, produces the one thing at the whole event that cannot be bought. Start this months out, because it takes weeks and it is what makes the evening about this marriage rather than about a milestone.
Collect what everyone wants to say →A wedding from around 2001 sits in an awkward technological gap: the album is fading and the video is on a format nothing in the house plays any more. Getting both digitised properly is unglamorous, genuinely urgent, and ends up being the gift the entire family uses rather than the one that goes in a cupboard.
Some families mark a silver jubilee by taking the pheras again, or with a church blessing, or with a temple visit and a small puja at home. All of these happen. None of them is the way it is done nationally, practice varies by community and by family, and not every priest will perform a renewal. Ask your own family priest what is appropriate for your family rather than copying a video, and ask early, because the date has to suit them too.
The obvious move is to buy something silver, which usually joins the other silver in a cupboard. The better version is silver already in the house: the wedding thali cleaned and actually used that evening, a piece from a grandmother brought back out, the cutlery nobody has touched since 2003. It costs nothing and it means something.
The failure of a silver jubilee is a queue of relatives working through the marriage chronologically while the couple sit facing a room. Two speeches, prepared, three minutes each, and tell everybody else the floor is closed. Agreeing to be celebrated is agreeing to a moment, not to an hour of being summarised.
The long chronological montage takes on an obituary shape and the couple can feel it. Pick specific things instead: one year, one photograph, one story each from a few people. Specific reads as knowing them. Comprehensive reads as summing them up, and twenty five years is not an ending.
Most couples at twenty five have one, deferred so long it has turned into a joke. Twenty five years is usually the point where the children are earning, the parents are still well, and the only missing thing is somebody actually booking it. Book it rather than suggesting it. A suggested trip does not survive contact with two people who are used to saying no.
Their children have heard fragments and have never heard it straight through: who introduced them, what each of them thought, what the families said, what the first year was actually like. Twenty minutes on a phone, asked calmly and not at a party, is the recording the family will still have in thirty years.
Everything a couple receives at twenty five is addressed to them jointly, which means nobody says anything to either of them in particular. Two letters, one each, saying what you have watched them each carry, is the thing that gets kept. This is also the only item here that a child living abroad can do as well as one living at home.
Twenty five years carries twenty five years of complication: an estranged brother, a family that behaved badly at a funeral, a friend nobody has spoken to since. Those calls belong to the couple, and they should be made before invitations go out rather than in the week before, when refusing somebody becomes a public event of its own.
Ask the couple first whether they want a function and a guest list or a long dinner with eight people, and take the answer. If there is a function, the one rule that matters is that they arrive as guests: no greeting at the door, no checking on the caterer, no settling anything.
Some families do, with the pheras taken again, a church blessing, or a temple visit and a puja at home. Practice varies by community and by family and not every priest will perform a renewal, so ask your own family priest what suits your family, and ask early because the date has to suit them too.
Messages collected from people who were at the wedding, the album and wedding video digitised off formats nothing plays any more, or the trip they postponed for you, booked rather than suggested. All three take weeks, so start months out. Silver they already own beats new silver almost every time.
Two, prepared, three minutes each, and close the floor after. A queue of relatives working through the marriage chronologically turns into a summing-up while the couple sit facing a room, and agreeing to be celebrated is agreeing to a moment rather than to an hour of it.
Photos, your words, their song, and wishes from everyone, on one beautiful page, shared with one link.
Make a birthday page (free)
