Hicksville filled in almost all at once. The potato ground west of the Long Island Rail Road went under concrete between roughly 1948 and 1960, and the result is a hamlet of capes, splits and ranches on grid streets where the original buyers' children are now grandparents and a surprising number of the original couples are still in the same house. That is the defining fact of anniversary ordering here, and it is nothing like ordering for a young marriage in a rental. A fiftieth anniversary in Hicksville usually happens in the kitchen the couple has cooked in since Eisenhower, with a Sunday lunch afterward and grandchildren driving in from three counties. It means the delivery window is a weekend morning rather than a weekday afternoon, the recipient is almost certainly home, and the arrangement gets put on a table that has a fixed and non-negotiable centre. Measure your ambition accordingly: on a milestone anniversary the flowers are furniture for a room full of people, not a surprise for one.
The younger anniversaries in 11801 run the opposite way and need the opposite instruction. Those are two-income households where both people are on the Main Line before eight in the morning — Hicksville's station is the busiest on Long Island outside the city terminals, and the Oyster Bay branch splits off here — and the house is empty until after six. If the plan is dinner out, the flowers should be waiting when they get back rather than carried through a restaurant and a train station. Order in the morning, pay for a timed window in the late afternoon, and have it taken in by whoever is home first. If neither of them will be, name a neighbour. For couples who make the anniversary a night in the city and stay over, send to the Manhattan hotel instead and treat the Hicksville address as the wrong target entirely — a bouquet on a kitchen counter for thirty-six hours is a sad object.
Restaurant deliveries need one rule and one warning. The rule: call the restaurant before you order. Most Nassau dining rooms will hold an arrangement at the host stand and bring it to the table when the couple is seated, but they need to know it is coming and which reservation it belongs to. The warning: a two-top cannot take a large vase, and a steakhouse table is already crowded. The restaurants Hicksville couples drive to for an anniversary are mostly north and west — Bryant & Cooper Steak House in Roslyn, Majors Steak House on Jericho Turnpike in Woodbury, Rothmann's in East Norwich, Piccola Bussola in Mineola — and none of them wants a showpiece landing mid-service. Send something small to the table, or send the real arrangement to the house and let the table get a single stem. There is a third route worth mentioning: the South Broadway strip through Hicksville, the centre of one of the largest South Asian communities on Long Island, where an anniversary is often marked at home with a pooja rather than out. If that is your occasion, ask the shop whether it can source jasmine strands or a marigold garland, and give notice, because that material is ordered in rather than pulled from a cooler.