For Wilshire Baptist Church
LeAnn and I were in the greeting card aisle at Target after Christmas and a young woman walked up to us, and said, “Excuse me, but I have a question: Should thank you notes for Christmas gifts have a Christmas theme or can they be any type of thank you note?”
She had a box of colorful cards in her hand that were for general purposes and we advised her they would do fine. She thanked us and moved on.
The thing that struck me most is that the woman was going to send thank you notes for Christmas gifts. That is in many regards a lost art — a nicety from a kinder, gentler age.
I was taught to send thank you notes for Christmas gifts by my grandmother, who thought it was good and proper along with standing straight, eating slowly and speaking clearly. She would always call after Christmas to make sure I was sending thank you notes, her measure of my progress being the fact that she hadn’t received a note from me yet. Even though I saw her every Christmas and I thanked her and hugged her in person, she still wanted to get a thank you note.
I quit sending Christmas thank you notes in 1983. That was the year my grandmother died, and without her gentle prodding I let the practice slide. It might also be that I was exhausted from writing thank you notes for wedding gifts that same year.
I’ve never quit saying thank you to people and I’ve done so with notecards on some occasions and certainly in emails and texts as situations have arisen and technology has allowed. But the old-fashioned handwritten thank you note is pretty much a thing of the past for me, although I revisited the practice a few years ago with LeAnn when we married and had lots of folks to thank. She continues the practice on a regular basis most likely because she had a good model in her mother. She also seems to have the right spirit about it, which leads me to wonder if perhaps writing thank you notes is a fruit of the spirit that comes more naturally to some than to others. Then again, maybe going through that process whether we want to or not helps nurture that spirit like watering a tree gives it life.
While thank you notes may be passé for some, expressing “thank you” in some form or fashion should never go out of style. We certainly give thanks every late November in a communal kind of way, but often our focus is on the people and the big events that have impacted our lives. But what about the people at the center of the everyday moments that make our lives run a little more smoothly: the checker who keeps the grocery line moving, the waiter who is patient as we change our mind a dozen times, the driver in the next lane that lets us merge, the church member who tolerates our ugly attitude on a Sunday morning? Aren’t those people in those moments true gifts in their own way? I think so.
So with that in mind, I’m making “Thank You” my mission statement for the year. I may say it in words, I may say it in deeds. It may be written, it may be spoken. It may be in private, it may be in public. It may even be anonymous. But I’m going to try to be more intentional about saying “thank you” this year, and I’ll start now by saying thank you for reading this post today.