A thank-you note doesn’t need to be lavish or even long-ish to be grand. One of my all-time favorites accompanied a check from a friend-and-client who indulges my insistence that every envelope, even one containing a check, is immeasurably enhanced by a personal note. On a square yellow sticky-note, she wrote, Heidi said your words were perfect. Thanks. And my most admired editor wrote right on his business card, Thanks a zillion, AK! What more could I ask?

If a thank-you note makes me happy, I keep it: An embellished post card can do the trick. As can a slab of corrugated cardboard. And the vintage card {farthest left} made me laugh out loud. It reads, Thank you for your lovely giftie, we have sold it – ain’t we thrifty? I have a few young friends who are excellent thank-you note writers, and they fill me with hope for the future.

Perhaps you’ve been meaning to thank someone for something. You could do it right now, thanks to this tasteful template we’ve whipped up for you. Simply print it out on a sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper and French-fold it, which is to say, fold it in quarters. {It’s designed to print on Strathmore Soft Aqua, my personal favorite.} If you are me, before you fold the sheet, you might flip it back through the printer to print the note on the inside. If you are me, chances are 98.6% that you will overprint the note on top of the design. In which case you will kuhnsole yourself by making an envelope to mail the note in. Which you can also do from an 8.5 x 11 sheet or magazine page, as I’ll demonstrate one day soon.

Meanwhile, Jon Carroll, superb columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, reprints his reflections on gratitude each year on Thanksgiving. His column appeared on page E2 on November 27, 2008 – I clipped it out and filed it in my Thank You Notes of Note file. You can be inspired by his eloquent expression of thanks right here. You’re welcome!

Credit where due: Thank you very much card designed and letterpress printed by Peculiar Pair Press – on Strathmore.