When Wedding Thank You Cards Are Due (And Why the Year Is a Myth)

The box of thank you cards is on the kitchen counter, still in its shrink wrap, where you set it down the week you got back from the honeymoon. Beside it sits the list your aunt kept at the reception, three pages of names and gifts in her handwriting, and the checks are long since deposited. Somebody at the reception told you wedding thank you cards can wait a year, and six weeks later the box has moved twice, once for groceries and once for the mail.

Two deadlines and one year

Convention gives a guest up to a year after the wedding to send a gift. That window was measured for the friend who waited to see what you still needed once the honeymoon was over. It sets nothing for the couple, and it is the figure that gets repeated at receptions.

Wedding thank you cards come due in two windows. A gift that arrives before the wedding gets its card within two weeks of arriving. A gift that arrives at the wedding or after it gets its card within three months of the wedding day. Both windows are yours, and both close while the guest still has months of theirs left.

When the gift arrives	Whose window is running	Deadline
Before the wedding	The couple's	Two weeks after the gift arrives
At the wedding	The couple's	Three months after the wedding
After the wedding	The couple's	Three months after the wedding
The gift itself, sent by the guest	The guest's	Up to a year after the wedding

Where three months goes

Couples pass three months on the size of the list, and a late card is still the card the guest wanted. Say the list runs to 120 cards and one card takes 10 minutes: find the gift on your aunt's pages, write three lines that name it, address the envelope, stamp it. Both figures are assumptions, and your own list will change them.

120 cards times 10 minutes is 1,200 minutes. Divide 1,200 by 60 and the box holds 20 hours of writing.

At 8 hours a day, 20 hours is two and a half working days. A block that size does not open up in the months after a wedding, when the Saturdays go to returns and the name change, so the box sits waiting for one that never arrives. Nobody budgets 20 hours for a package that arrived by courier and fits under one arm.

Five cards an evening

Five cards is 50 minutes, which is one evening between dinner and bed. 120 cards divided by 5 is 24 evenings. Write every night and the list you came home with is done in under a month, weeks inside the three months.

Start with the gifts that arrived before the wedding. Their two weeks began the day each box came to the door, and most of those days went to the wedding itself. Then work down your aunt's pages in the order she wrote them, five names at a time, at the same hour every evening. Five names decided in advance removes the nightly question of where to pick up.

Split the list by window before the first evening. Gifts that arrive in the weeks before the wedding are on the two week clock, one at a time, and clearing them as they come leaves the rest for the other side of the day.

Two people writing five cards each is 10 a night and halves the evenings. Sitting at the same table with the same list is the version couples finish, because one person holding all 20 hours is the one who stops after week two.

The 24 evenings clear the list you have tonight. A gift that arrives by mail in month two goes on the end of that list, and it gets written the evening after it lands, which keeps it inside its own three months without touching the schedule.

Wedding thank you cards sent in month five still get opened, and one written then takes the same 10 minutes as one written in week three. Put the gift in the first line instead of the apology, because the guest is looking for the name of the thing they chose and how it is being used.

Tonight the shrink wrap comes off and five cards leave the house. Another five go every evening after that, until your aunt's third page is crossed through.