
Advice from one annoying parent and their long-suffering child
It’s your birthday, you’ve received a lot of great presents, and you want to show your appreciation. How about sending a real, handwritten thank you note? It’s a thoughtful idea, acknowledging the time and effort your loved ones dedicated to sourcing a meaningful gift, by putting in some of your own time to write and mail a letter showing your gratitude. This simple tradition has almost become extinct.
I’ll admit, even I don’t send traditional thank you letters to everyone anymore – only to a few chosen favourites whom I know truly appreciate it! These are often picture notecards, which I enjoy choosing to suit the recipient. When I was a child in the 1980s, a common birthday present was a pack of ‘notelets’ and envelopes, often featuring cute animals, which would be immediately deployed for the post-birthday thank you mailing.
Handwriting has in large part been replaced, for me, by email, or by sending a postcard typed and mailed through a digital service like TouchNote, with one of my own photos on the front. For many people today, the most common way of expressing gratitude seems to be in short-form texts, WhatsApps or similar. And that’s just evolution: of course, any ‘thank you’, however brief, is very much better than no ‘thank you’.
But perhaps you have a friend or relative that you don’t see often and who would be touched to receive a handwritten note. With the cost and effort of postage today, it’s a meaningful gesture, in my opinion, that shows deep respect and care for the recipient. Many people find the prospect of putting literal pen to literal paper daunting. If that’s you… read on for some proven tips!
My long-suffering kids were made to write thank you letters from a young age, passing on a family tradition based on the fear that givers might never send a gift again if they didn’t receive a thank you note! Chatting to my adult son the other day, I was gratified to hear that he now claims to appreciate this travail and can even remember the approach I taught him, which he shares below!
Never written a thank you letter? Fear not! They’re actually pretty easy. Use a two-part approach – the thanks, and the update. The thanks is the tangible reason you’re sending the letter. It needs to be personal, not just a formulaic sentence with an inserted gift and name. Why are you so grateful for the gift? Admittedly this can be easier said than done: if the gift you’ve had isn’t particularly exciting, it can be hard to verbalise exactly why it’s good. So be creative and enjoy it! Someone bought you socks? You really needed some new ones, and they’re so comfy! What an incredible pack of colouring pens – you have never seen so many wonderful shades of blue! My little sister used to set herself the challenge of including her latest favourite word (such as ‘stupendous’) in these descriptions, to make it more fun. Not every gift is life-changing, but it’s always nice to hear that someone is using the thing you spent time and money getting them.
The catch up, in my view, is the thing that makes these letters unique, and important. I’m sure you have a relative who you exchange gifts with, but otherwise see infrequently. This is your chance to let them know how things are going. This section is the one you send in every thank you letter of that batch. It doesn’t need to be a novella, it doesn’t even need to encapsulate the whole year, it can just be a recap of a couple of important or exciting events currently happening in your life.
If you’re still at school, relatives usually love to hear about that, whether it’s a funny anecdote about something that happened in class or sharing a recent success (but don’t brag!) If nothing comes to mind there, you can always just write about your recent birthday or Christmas, or whatever occasion prompted the gift. Reading a couple of those I wrote as a teenager, I often just summarised what our family did over Christmas and the New Year! It’s worth spending a little time on this section, since once you have it nailed, it will only need subtle changes. For example, if your granny spent Christmas with you, you’ll need to adapt the description to include her, rather than talking about it as if she wasn’t there.
Mum says she had to write every thank you letter by hand as a child. Luckily, she wasn’t so draconian with us. We saved handwritten efforts for our closest loved ones (mainly grandparents.) Past that, we would use a typed document so we could copy and adapt it, then print it and mail it, or Mum would send it as an email attachment for us. Later, when we had our own email accounts, we used ‘send again’ with personalised edits for each recipient. Top tip: make sure you don’t forget to change the name at the beginning, as this rather gives away the mass-produced origins of your message!
Before I sign off in a pleasing glow of smug parenthood, I should add that when asked if he still sends long-form thank you emails or notes, there was a long silence from my son. I suspect that iMessage has become his medium of choice – always following the thanks/update model, of course!
Photo credit: Jakob Owens via Unsplash