Breaking News: Thank You Notes
A shout out to Andrea who sent me the link to the SF Chronicle article about thank you notes: Are thank-you notes passe in the e-mail age? It never ceases to amaze me that every six months or so an article about thank you notes will pop up—begging the question Have they gone away? The answer is always no. I can say this based entirely on the fact that the stationery industry is alive and when. We can worry about letters when people stop buying paper. I have yet to see the drug store that’s done away with its greeting-card section. I think we letter lovers will be okay for a little longer.
The writer of the article, Jen Burke Anderson, laments that she’s written many thank you notes lately and no one has given her a response. My response to that would be that you don’t need to get a thank you if you give a thank you. The original gift was enough. Of course you can e-mail / text Thanks for the note. But it’s not necessary. I’ve also had people thank me years later for letters I’ve written, so just because you don’t get an instant response doesn’t mean you won’t get one eventually. The years-later response is better, too, because it means what you wrote stood out enough for them to remember it all this time. In the article, Lizzie Post (great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post) had a similar reaction. “Don’t write a thank-you to get a response; write one to really thank somebody.” Exactly!
FYI: This is going to be a slow blogging week for me. I’m finishing a book proposal and getting ready to go away for the long weekend. I’m sure I’ll have some insights, but they might be on the short side. . .
June 30th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
I write thank you notes all the time, for gifts, for thoughtful gestures, or just for being there for me when I need it most. I don’t expect a response. And judging from the stationery stores and stationery aisles at the stores, thank you notes are not going away anytime soon.
My problem lately is how to write a letter to someone you KNOW is not going to take the time to respond. I write several friends who don’t have email, or don’t depend on email to keep in touch with others, and it’s hard to keep writing these friends when I know they will not respond. Hardly anyone takes the time to sit down to write a letter these days. And, that is reinforced by the fact that one is usually hard pressed to find letter writing stationery at even the stationery stores, or at least the stores around where I live.
Do you have a store that you like for letter writing supplies? Other than Crane, I don’t have luck with finding letter writing sheets. Also, do you often find yourself writing a letter to someone who you fully expect will NOT respond? How do you even formulate such a letter. It seems very self-centered to write a letter and just talk about oneself.
Your opinion?
June 30th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
I just wrote a thank you letter for a generous thank you gift which was akward. Actually it was a letter of appreciation for the thank you gesture I guess.
Maggie is there a Papyrus store near you? They have inexpensive stationary with a deckle edge I use for the “kinda special” letters. For those “special” letters I like Amalfi hanemade paper-you can Google it. But it’s $38 for 20 sheets and envelopes-but oh so nice when written on with a fountain pen! http://www.pendemonium.com/ has cool writing stuff! I have a huge paper wardrobe but it’s sitting. I need Samara and her blogger friends to give me the inspiration to write!!!
BTW I don’t expect a reply back from those I send letters to. But hearing from the recepient that the letter had made a difference in their life is quite gratifyng.
Hey does this mean I’m a blogger???
June 30th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
This is another good source for cards/stationery/gifts -
http://www.brushdance.com/
They have calls for art and product giveaways too.
June 30th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Maggie, you make very good points regarding stationery materials and writing to recipients who you know will not respond in kind.
Because I’m not terribly crafty or artistic I view the letters I write as personal art projects. I take the same pride in my personal letters as someone else might in their knitting, woodwork, or painting. I am a Crane stationery lover because they provide such a nice blank canvas for me to work on my letter writing art. My problem with a lot of letter writing stationery is that it is often very cluttered or busy and I enjoy having the wide expanse of “blankness” to create. Smythson, Fine Stationery, and American Stationery also sell letter writing sheets. Add .com to any of these names and you’ll pull up their websites. I can’t provide any feedback in terms of quality but together they provide some options.
As for those non-responders, one thing to keep in mind is that you have no idea what kind of reaction your letters receive. I’d like to believe that most, if not all, recipients are moved or touched simply because you took the time to single them out and write. Honestly, how many people do this! You also don’t know what kind of mood your letter might have caught them in upon arrival, and how it may have taken them out of a dark or lonely place. Even if their day had been moving along swimmingly your letter’s arrival still put a smile on their face and made their day that much better. The fact that these people don’t have email or aren’t dependent on it to keep in touch may mean that your letters hold MORE significance. I know, I know, it still would provide much reciprocal joy if they’d extend the same courtesy and write back, but don’t let that rob you of your thoughtfulness and pleasure you get in writing.
And heck, if you feel like writing and they don’t write back, keep writing anyway!
June 30th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
I second Maggie and Samara, thank you notes won’t go away, and they’re always appreciated by the recipients. It’s funny how this topic just came up, because I just received a heartwarming response from a secretary of my mentor in response to a thank you not I wrote. I can’t thank Samara enough for her positive influence on me.
Maggie, I can relate to how you feel. When I went to summer camp in Minnesota for several weeks, the camp counselors forced campers to send two letters home each week. With mom being in Tokyo, and rarely writing at all, I dreaded writing letters. Not any more. Letters are always appreciated regardless of what you write about yourself. I don’t know how much time you have, but maybe you can get a bit creative and draw, or create collages. Which reminds me, about a year ago, my friend has a niece in grade school whose class had a year long project where a notebook would be sent from recipient to recipeint around the globe, to eventually have it sent back to her at the end of the year. I ended up writing some, and pasting it with local trinkets, business cards from the voodoo museum, et al, and she ate it up like it was the best letter ever. Yeah, you could say something like, “the weather is so hot and dry that the grass in my back yard is so brown, yet the sunflowers are blooming like crazy” and take samples of grass and sunflower and paste it along the margin or body of the letter.
Speaking of stationery… Samara mentioned paper-source.com in one of her blogs under the stationery section circa February ‘09, and I thought they had a buncha cool stuff there. They even have videos showing how to do cool craft stuff. At one point, I want to buy the envelope building kit to create my own envelopes using the fancy paper in their catalogue. I would recommend my local store papierplume.com, but their website doesn’t show any of their fancy stationery. For example, they turned me on to the triangles in the Les enveloppes loufoques section of www.ecritoire.fr during Valentine’s, and I’ve also toyed around with the Classica by Kartos.com - looks kinda similar to Amalfi, but half the quantity at about half the price. They also have some other fancy selections, but I don’t know the name of the brand.
Rodney, thank you for mentioning Amalfi, I’ll need to check them out some time. I like Noodlers as well, and have been shopping between Pendemonium and Swisher Pens. Also noticed executive essentials now carries Noodlers in their paper catalog, and if you do an coupon search on google, you could usually get free shipping and/or 10+% discount. Maggie, good luck with your stationery search, and don’t give up your cause.