What to Write in a Thanksgiving Card

A Thanksgiving card is a thank you note that arrives with a socially approved excuse. That is its whole advantage, and most people waste it by writing something that could have gone to anybody.

Name one thing

The rule that matters. General thanks is pleasant and forgettable. Specific thanks is kept in a drawer.

Not: thank you for everything you do. Instead: thank you for driving forty minutes to sit in a hospital car park with me in March, which I have not properly acknowledged and have thought about since.

One thing, described so that it could not be anybody else's card. Everything else in the card is packaging.

The reason this works has nothing to do with writing skill. It is that being thanked generally feels like politeness, and being thanked specifically feels like being seen.

The gratitude letter

There is a formal version of this and it is worth knowing about, because it is one of the few card-writing exercises with actual research behind it.

The Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley publishes it as the gratitude letter: write to somebody who did something for you that you never properly thanked them for, describe what they did and how it affected you, and deliver it. Its listed sources include Seligman and colleagues in 2005, who found it produced the largest happiness benefit of the five exercises they tested when measured a month later, with the effect declining by six months.

Thanksgiving is the obvious occasion for it, and the person it goes to is usually not a family member. It is a teacher, an old manager, a neighbor, somebody who was decent at a moment when they did not have to be.

An honest word about the research

I want to be careful here, because gratitude is heavily marketed and the evidence is softer than the marketing.

A 2021 systematic review in the Journal of Occupational Health looked at gratitude interventions and found a mixed picture. Stress and depression improved in all three studies that measured them, but positive affect improved in only two of five and life satisfaction in only one of four, and interventions asking for four or fewer gratitude lists showed no significant change on any outcome.

Robert Emmons, whose work underpins much of this field, describes gratitude as having two parts: affirming that there are good things in the world and things we have received, and recognizing that the sources of that good are outside ourselves.

So: writing a genuine, specific thank you is a good thing to do and may make you feel better. It is not a proven intervention and anybody telling you otherwise is selling a journal.

For family

The Thanksgiving card to family is the hardest one, because you see them and the card can feel redundant.

Use it to say the thing you would not say out loud at the table. That is what the format is for. Something you are grateful for that you have never mentioned, or something you got wrong and have not addressed.

Keep it to four sentences. A long letter at Thanksgiving reads as an event and puts pressure on the reader to respond in kind.

For colleagues

Short, specific, and about work rather than about life.

Thank you for taking the Henderson thing off my desk in September when you had no reason to. It made a real difference and I have not said so.

That is better than any general seasonal message, and it is the kind of thing people remember at review time, which is a slightly cynical observation and also true.

More on that register in what to write in a thank you card.

For someone having a hard year

Do not insist on gratitude. This is the most common failure of Thanksgiving cards and it is well meant.

A person who has lost somebody, lost a job, or spent the year ill does not need a card telling them to count their blessings. Write instead: this has been a hard year and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I am grateful for you, and I am here.

That is a Thanksgiving card. It just does not look like the ones in the shop. There is more on the hardest version of this in what to say when someone dies.

A fact for the card

If you want a line with something in it: Thanksgiving is on the fourth Thursday of November because Congress put it there in 1941, not because it always was.

Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November in his proclamation of 3 October 1863. Franklin Roosevelt moved it earlier in 1939 to lengthen the shopping season, which produced two years in which some states kept one date and some kept another. The House passed a resolution in 1941 restoring the last Thursday, the Senate amended it to the fourth, and Roosevelt signed it in December 1941.

Two competing Thanksgivings, running simultaneously in different states, is a genuinely good thing to know at a table.

For what goes with the card, Thanksgiving gift ideas, and the what to write hub has the rest.