When I was younger, I hated writing thank you letters. It was always a chore, never a pleasure, but something my parents would never let slip. Many an hour was spent staring out of the window trying to work out exactly how to say thank you for yet more writing paper.
As I got older, I started having to write fewer thank you letters, as my grandparents passed away and as I became "too grown-up" for presents from a lot of relatives.
But as I got older still (and this post is scheduled to go live on my 30th birthday, so I'm positively ancient...!) and started giving more gifts, I began to understand how important that thank you is. Not necessarily in the old-fashioned way - a heartfelt thanks in person, a text or an email, all can be more than enough to reward and reassure the gift-giver, and thank them for their kind thoughts (even if you can't think of any redeeming features to the present itself).
So by the time the Husband and I came back from honeymoon to a list of 50 thank you letters to be written, I'd got to the stage where I enjoyed writing them - explaining to the giver why we'd asked for a thing, why it was important, and thanking them for coming to the wedding. Mind you, the process still took three months.
These days, I'd still rather drop certain people a card than an email. But often good intentions slipped away - usually because I didn't have a suitable card or piece of paper to hand and so needed to pop to the shops, and then I would forget to go for a while, and then it would be just too late to say thank you.
So when I saw these beautiful correspondence cards on Etsy I had to get them. They're personalised with my name in the bottom right corner, which is a lovely touch - and a useful one if your handwriting is quite so bad as mine can be - means gift givers should at least be able to work out why I'm writing.
The paper is lovely and thick, and the cards are the perfect size for the message - thank you, or I made you this, or "boo!" - as well as a bit of news, and the usual pleasantries - without becoming a full blown epistle.
What I really love, though, is the slight creepiness of the illustrations. What is that Victorian gent doing with the giant butterfly? Does he know it's there? Is it a giant, or is he tiny?
I've been known to keep one or two in my desk drawer at work so I can send a quick thank you note for a dinner party the next morning if I think my host is old-fashioned enough to want a thank you note (and I don't think being old-fashioned is a bad thing at all in that context).
I got my cards here. There are oodles of cards on Etsy, but to my mind, these are still the best. Currently, there are none listed in the shop, just wedding invitations and calling cards - but the seller does do special requests, so if you send her a message, I'm sure she'll help out! I paid about £10 for 10, but that was a while ago.
And I have a sneaking suspicion that, by the time you read this, I'm going to need to write a thank you letter or two!
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