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A tradition that started as a joke has kept friends in contact for the past |7 years travels around the Hippy ‘Aaniversary Friends for life! These three Port Perry couples are bound by a 17-year-old annivesary card that world. From left, Bryan and Rita Hilker, Warren and Lynda Pollard, and Jim and Anita Witty, got together recently to talk to Focus on Scugog about their unusual tradition. Photo by Christina Coughlin It’s not every day that you find an anniversary card that has been ‘actively’ roaming this earth almost as long as you have - and visited more places to boot! But that’s exactly what I encountered last month after meeting Bryan and Rita Hilker and their friends. For the past 17 years, a group of five couples, all origi- nally from Ajax, have been circulating the same card for their wedding anniversaries. Every year, the card makes the noble, often risky, journey from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, all the way to New Zealand, and finally to Port Perry and Ajax before starting the round trip all over again. What innocently began as a last minute gift idea, or as participant Jim Witty jokes “just a way of being cheap,” has spawned into a tradition the couples look forward to every year. “We write little updates about our lives,” says Rita Hilker, a participant and resident of Port Perry. As she 26 FOCUS - SEPTEMBER 2010 opens the card and scans through pages of documented memories, she notes that the couples have written about their grandchildren being born, moving from one part of the country to another, their vacations and how they celebrated their anniversaries and retirements. Every year, the process is just the same. Each couple receives the card a few days before their anniversary. After ‘catching up’ with the other couples’ lives through their written messages, the pair must then record their own favourite moments from the past year. And, keeping with tradition, the couples always write about how they will be celebrating their anniver- sary that particular year. “Then we send it to the next couple,” Rita explains. “it’s a way of being thoughtful.” As Rita recalls, the couples became friends after meeting in their hometown of Ajax — the men belonged. to the Kinsmen Club of Ajax and the women belonged to the Kinette Club of Ajax. The tradition of the anniversary