Thank You Notes
Hand written thank you notes are rare to receive these days. It seems like the sentiment: ‘thank you’ is sent either via email or worse, not sent at all. I’ve gone through the stage of making sure I am not giving something to someone in order to receive something back. I try not to give a gift of any kind with the expectation that I will be praised or make someone feel like they owe me. I’m over that stage.
I still want a thank you note. Many of my friends tell me the same thing. They are sad (some annoyed) that carefully chosen gifts or hosted events are never acknowledged with a ‘got it!’ much less a thank you. What is it about this custom that people think it has faded away like 45 records, car bingo and eating dinner with the family around the kitchen table? Are thank you notes just an old fashioned tradition that we don’t need anymore?
I thought this was the product of my generation. Then, I started getting thank you notes from a couple of thirty year olds when I sent them birthday gifts. They even sent a thank you note after they had been to our house for dinner. I was surprised. After about a year of sweet hand written notes I told them how much I appreciated their notes but I didn’t expect them anymore. I felt that our friendship was deep enough to bypass that formality. We got into a conversation about the concept of thank you notes. Both the husband and the wife had been taught to write notes by their parents. He said, “When we write a note we are taking a moment to feel the gift again. We speak about what the gift meant to us and enjoy experiencing it as if we just got it. It’s like getting a gift all over again.”
These are not people with a lot of time on their hands. He is a surgeon and she is a mother with two kids under age 3. I know what he meant. When I get a note I feel special because I know I was on their mind again. I know when they wrote they were thinking about me and I hope they were thinking good things. They still send me hand written note. They say, “Why miss an opportunity to say, we appreciate you.” I love that.
My mother taught me to write thank you notes. But all of her children don’t write them so there goes that theory. Still, I love writing them. I once wrote a note to the president of Sony Studios for a publishing deal. I picked out special stationary that expressed my personality. I wrote on hand made paper with a strong cursive penmanship. It wasn’t just words that made up the gesture. It was the whole package of paper, ink, and my handwriting that would communicate my gratitude. He wrote me back that he almost never gets an old fashioned hand written note anymore and mine would sit on his desk for awhile because he loved the personal attention I had given him and his company. Of course he was emailing me his thanks – but – I knew I had made him feel like I valued what his company did for mine. And that’s the moral of this message. In this world of less and less personal communication, any little effort that makes each other feel special is like water in the desert.
I don’t want a verbal thank you – I mean I do – but I want more. I want to know that after we have parted ways from the party, or event, or dinner that you haven’t forgotten me. I want to know what you are thinking and if I made a difference in your life. I want this not because I am insecure but because I care so much about you. I want to build relationships -not text about them. We are created for relationships. Spend a little ink on them. Without historical written notes our history would be unknown. Make some history. Write a note. The next time you receive a gift of any kind, stop the texting, swyping, voice mailing and tell the giver that you are thankful for their effort. Make it personal. In this world where there are a million ways to communicate, we are also learning how not to communicate if we hide, avoid, and mis-communicate electronically or not at all.
Be in relationship. Make it personal. Make someone feel like they matter. When you do, people will exceed all the world’s expectations.
