In the weeks after my wife and I got married, I began to loathe thank you notes. I like them in principle, but the quantity we needed to write was mind-numbing. I wrote the words “thoughtful” and “wonderful” and “just what we wanted” so many times that I thought I must owe the creator of those words some money for copyright violation.
To ease the monotony, I actually wrote a fake thank-you note that went something like this:
Dear Friend of My Parents That We Were Forced to Invite to Our Wedding:
How bold of you to have gone off our registry! We’ve never met you and yet here you are assuming that you know our tastes better than we do. Never mind the placemats from Crate & Barrel that we selected – apparently the ones you saw at a crafts show in Santa Fe must surely be the ones we desire. Best of all, we can’t return them! We’ll be donating your gift to charity before the end of the year!Fondly, The People Who Reluctantly Bought You a Steak Dinner
I never sent this note, of course, but the mere act of writing it was incredibly soothing.
Well, now, here we are a few years later. My wife and I have a beautiful baby girl, and we are once again facing an outpouring of generosity from our friends and family. But with that generosity comes a catch in the form of another intense round of thank you notes. Part of me thinks we should be allowed to wait until my daughter is old enough to write and then she can just churn them out herself. But I love my daughter too much to burden her with that task, so the job is ours.
Many of our friends who have babies have made a thoughtful gesture along with the gift: telling us that we didn’t need to send them a thank you note. Clearly, they had gotten trapped in the thank-you note vortex themselves and had written the words “adorable” and “so cute” more times than they care to remember.
But here’s the weirdest part – my wife and I couldn’t take them up on their offer. Somehow, in writing all those thank you notes, we became unwilling addicts. It’s no longer an issue of whether I want to write thank you note for every gift; now I simply have to. Moreover, I find myself writing thank you notes even when one isn’t necessary or appropriate. If someone borrows something of mine, I write them a thank you note when they return it to me.
Friends find my addiction extremely stressful, I think because they’re afraid of catching it themselves. I’m pretty sure people have actually stopped doing nice things for me simply to avoid getting a note. But that won’t deter me. I’ll just write them a note to thank them for doing nothing.
As addictions go, I suppose this one isn’t all that bad. Even with the rising cost of postage, it’s still cheaper than being addicted to, say, opium. And there’s no second hand smoke, risk of heart disease, or legal ramifications. All I really have to deal with is a tired wrist and rampant overuse of the exclamation point!
Plus, at the end of the day, everyone likes getting a hand written thank you note. It’s classy, it’s personal, and it conveys a real sense of appreciation...unless, of course, you’ve just given me placemats that you bought at a crafts fair in Santa Fe.
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