Please and Thank You are 'two' Very Special Words

Dear Grandma and Grandpa, How are you? I am fine.  I am going to go to the movies tonight with Daddy, but first, I am writing to you. Thank you for thinking of me at my birthday, and sending me a present. I really want to get a new Easy Bake Oven and since mama won't buy it for me, I have to save up my own money for it. Thanks to your present, I only have a little bit longer to wait. Love, Lexa

Yeah, that happened. I was about 9 or 10 years old, and my grandmother had sent me a check for my birthday. It had never happened before — my parents and grandparents were big on kids not getting money for presents, but I think my mom put her up to it. She knew I wanted that Easy Bake Oven, and she didn't want grandma to buy it for me, so I got a check AND I wrote a thank you note. 

Grandma kept things like that, and when she died, we went through her stuff and found a box of letters and postcards from my sister and I as well as our cousins.  Among them were the thank you notes we sent for birthday, Christmas, and other occasions for which presents were sent or given. 

I remember being given the box of my mother's writing paper after every occasion. It always had a dark-lined page of paper that my sister and I would lay under the paper that we wrote on so that our sentences wouldn't trend up or down the page as we wrote, and the paper itself was bound with a ribbon that we were allowed to slip off the paper, but not untie.  We were given vague instructions about what to write, like "Always start off by saying something nice about what you've been doing lately", "Never mention the amount of money if you are given a check, that's rude", and "After thanking the person for your gift, write about what you will do with the gift, then thank them again before you end the letter."

When is the last time you've gotten a hand-written thank you note? Have you ever sent a gift to a friend or relative for a special occasion and been left wondering if they even recieved it? I have sent care packages to my oldest during each of his deployments, and while he was away at school, or being trained by the Marine Corps, and while he was sprucing up his newly rented house before he married and brought his bride home, and I've been left wondering whether he got them. I've sent cards with checks or cash in them to friends or their children, and haven't known if they received them until the check cleared the bank, or I called them up to ask.

I write thank you notes. I like to do it, because I like to get letters in the mail myself. I have special notecards that my husband and I created ourselves on one of the numerous photo websites out there, that allow you to make your own stationery using photographs you've taken. I usually write way too much, because I get started with the obligatory 'what I've been doing lately', and that takes up lots of space. Then I have to go to the left side of the card to finish it, or sometimes to the left, then the back. And I love to write using a gel ink pen, so if the back of the notecard has a glossy finish, I'm in trouble. Big trouble! Because I'm an impatient person, and the ink always smears because I can't wait until it dries before I try to pick up the card and put it in the envelope.

I also taught my sons to write thank you notes. Not e-mails, and not Facebook messages. The kinds of notes where you sit down at the desk and write them on paper with a pen. I always reminded my kids that the people love them didn't have to give them gifts, but they did, so thank them. Properly. Which is why it surprises me that my oldest doesn't send thank you cards on time, if at all.

We finally got a thank you card from him for the wedding gifts we gave him sometime in late April for a January wedding. "I'm BUSY, Mom!!!!!" was the response I got from him when I asked him when the thank yous were coming out.  I think I promised him that if he spent 15 minutes per night knocking out two thank you notes a night, he would get me off his case inside of a week (his wife had done most, and left him with like, 8). I got mine at the end of that week's worth of writing!! :)

I love to send gifts, and I love to send thank you notes. In this digital age, when we can send a kid to college on the other side of the country, and instant message with him the same evening that he arrives in his dorm, or when you can Skype with your kid on deployment overseas, it is especially nice, I think, to be able to open up a piece of mail that doesn't include the words "Amount due" and read a nice note.

It is nice to be able to sit at a table with a cup of coffee or tea and write notes to people and imagine how surprised they'll be when they find them in their mailboxes in a few days. In this age of instant everything, somehow, a handwritten note is much more pleasurable. I've found that my handwriting that I used to be so proud of, now stinks, and I don't like the lack of a backspace button to erase what I wrote that I no longer like, but I like the simplicity of writing a thank you note. 

So, do you, like I, now want to go ahead and write a thank you note? Take out some good note cards, or run to Papyrus or Target and get some new ones, and write someone a thank you note for something nice they did, or said, just for the heck of it.

Tell me how that went in the comments below this blog.