Reaching a tenth wedding anniversary these days certainly is something to be celebrated. Maybe if the difficulty had been foreseen, the ones assigning metals and stones to anniversary may have given something more valuable than the traditional tin or aluminum. Trying to stay with those substances when choosing an imaginative anniversary gift can be a challenge. Here are some 10th wedding anniversary gift ideas.

If you have been to shops featuring Mexican products, you may have seen many items made from tin. Consider a mirror in an ornate tin frame, candlesticks or a selection of tin Christmas tree decorations.

You could provide a selection of various food products, each in their tin. Imagine the happy celebrants opening up a box filled with ten tin of breath mints or ten assorted tins of crackers or cookies. In your search, you may find special, commemorative tins. Tracking down one that it dated from the year of the anniversary would be a special treat.

Tin is associated with the star badges that sheriffs wore in the Old West. Toy stores offer play versions. Two of these could be the focal point of a card you make for the occasion. The text of the card could talk about the couple, or about knowing how to keep the peace in marital territory.

Some craft kits use tin as the medium for making pictures by pounding nails and making indentations in the tin. The tin creation then is mounted on wood. You could get one of these kits to create a very special, personalized gift. Or you could assemble the materials yourself and make your own version of a wedding sampler in tin, featuring the name of the bride, groom and date.

Aluminum is the easier and more traditional of the two metals to choose for a tenth anniversary gift. After ten years of marriage and meal preparation, new aluminum cookware could be a very welcome gift. There are aluminum canister sets and wonderful aluminum wastebaskets with pedal operated lids. Spun aluminum, with fine parallel lines all over the surface, is especially attractive and practical, because it does not show scratches.

Perhaps you can find some of those wonderful aluminum beverage tumblers from the fifties that came in unique colors like turquoise, magenta and chartreuse. There were matching coasters as well and, of course, being the fifties there were ashtrays. Depending on the design, aluminum ashtrays could be re purposed as candy dishes or a collection of them could be transformed into a wind chime.

If you want to be even more original, consider a project that we did back in home mechanics class in grade school. We each started with a large, circular piece of aluminum, 12 inches or more in diameter. We engraved a design in the aluminum, using a blunt-nosed awl wiggled back and forth to etch the lines in the surface. Then we bent up the edges to form a tray' a one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

A basket with ten rolls of different varieties of aluminum foil would be a fun gift. More appreciated, though, may be a bottle or two of champagne' with the token aluminum at the top of each bottle.

Once you have found your gift, consider wrapping it in aluminum foil for another special tenth anniversary touch.