Yesterday Amy and I went to a wonderful Christmas party hosted by my writing group. One thing I enjoyed about it was interacting with people I did not know too well and also I finally got to show off my wife to them. As I was getting ready for bed, I realized the perfect way to express my appreciation for the invitation was a Thank You card with a quick note in it.

Thank you notes, much like RSVPs, are a form of etiquette that has mostly dropped off the radar and that is too bad. It does not take much effort and truly shows that you are a caring person as well as showing others how important they are to you. Plus, since few people actually bother to do it anymore it has even more impact.

One problem with this is the card itself. Few of us have stationary or a stock of thank you cards piled up in our desks. Thanks to email and Microsoft Word we rarely need to hand write anything other than thanks for wedding and child birth gifts. I actually solved this dilemma for myself a few years ago. I actually designed my own thank you cards. You can do it pretty much any program, even Word, although I chose CorelDraw. A few years back I made a logo for myself to help me appear more professional when approaching magazines and publishers. I took that logo and placed it on the front of the card. I divided the page in half and duplicated the card outline so that each time I printed a sheet, I had two cards. Honestly, it took me 15 minutes to design this. Now when I need a thank you card, I put a sheet of cardstock in the printer, print the file, and then cut the two cards out. Fold and you now have a blank card to write something in.

The great thing about these cards is that the space is pretty limited, so you can fill it up quickly with just a few sentences. A brief thank you and a description of one thing that you are thanking them for is all you need. Then grab an envelope, stamp, and plop it in the mail. For a few minutes of effort, your recipient will most certainly be touched at your thoughtfulness and you will have made the world just a little bit better.