Weddingbee Blog

Please pardon the pause in our wedding day recaps.

Hive, I’ve got to get this out in the open. I have been less than stellar in terms of our thank you notes lately.

Writing thank you notes was of utmost importance to me. If someone is going to go out of their way to spend money and give us a gift, they deserve our most sincere thanks. Bottom line. I can’t even express how disappointed I am in myself considering how poorly this situation has turned out.

We ordered a massive amount of thank you cards right at the beginning of planning, to make sure we always had some on hand for any gifts we received.

Things started off strong. For the gifts we got at our engagement party, I made sure that every single person got a thank you note immediately after the party. It was so exciting to get our first few wedding-related gifts, and it was so easy to get those few cards into the mail in no time. Done and done

Our Dallas area shower went off famously. My mom helped me make a really neatly detailed list of gifts, and again, thank you notes were out in the mail less than a week later.

Sweet Gifts

The mishaps started after our shower in Mr. HW’s home town. The shower guests were a mixture of Mr. HW’s family and friends, and some new guests that I didn’t know as well (like my MIL’s friends from around town). Everyone was so generous and it was so sweet of them to “shower” me with gifts when they didn’t even know me that well. Mr. HW’s cousin worked diligently on making a gift list during the shower for me to use for the thank you notes. As the gifts were being opened, the cards were separated from the gifts and put into a separate pile.

After the shower was over, we went outside into the blustery, windy day and packed everything up into the car and went out for lunch. And then we never saw the gift list again. Perhaps it blew away in the wind, or got thrown away, but it was gone.

And now I had a trunk full of (very generous and thoughtful) gifts from people who I didn’t know that well, and couldn’t remember who had given what gift since all of the cards had been pulled out and separated. One of the hostesses of the shower luckily had each guest address their own thank you note envelope and place it into a little bird cage at the entrance. It was a sweet gesture to help me and acted as a guestbook of sorts for the event.

My MIL and I worked together and tried our best to match each gift up with the “guestbook’” envelopes from the shower. We did the best we could, and I hope no one was left out and/or got a thank you note for the wrong gift.

Once the wedding date grew closer and closer, we began to receive wedding gifts in person, through the mail, or through a third party (like my dad handing me a gift from his co-worker, for example). Distant acquaintances (who weren’t on our wedding address list at all) would send gifts and I wouldn’t have a return address for them. Gifts from other people would get thrown into a bag of someone else, and I didn’t know which gift belonged to which giver. Things came in at all different locations and times.

It was all so difficult and confusing.

I had high hopes to document the gifts in a handy online spreadsheet, but it didn’t work out well at all because I didn’t have access to a computer at all times, and then once I made sure I had a hard copy printed out, it still didn’t work. Someone would hand me a gift at work and the spreadsheet would be at home. Or I’d leave it at work, and get home to a gift on the doorstep.

So, everything wound up being written down on random pieces of scratch paper or I’d hang onto wedding cards stuffed into my purse attempting to remind myself to send them a thank you note. I’d have memories of writing a thank you note to a specific person, but I’d look down on my stupid scratch paper and there wasn’t a big check mark next to it signifying that I had written it. Had I imagined it? Had I just forgotten to check it off? I had no way of double checking myself. Ugh.

I do not recommend this strategy to anyone. This whole post is stemming from a phone call I got today with someone wondering if we ever got their gift or not. So obviously I did not send them a thank you note when I thought I had. I am mortified and do not want to make the same mistakes again.

Does anyone have any suggestions on better gift management for the future? How did you keep track of all of your wedding gifts?