Saying thank you is not nearly enough

I knew it would be a while before I'd be able to send out thank you cards because I wanted to create them with a picture of us on the wedding day holding up our Thank and You cards and with pictures from our honeymoon since so many of our guests gave us cash and checks either directly or through our honeyfund.com site.  That said, when I finally got our pro pics back, I found the best pic I could of us holding the Thank and You cards (remember almost all the shots our photog took of us holding them had my sign covering up Mr Fix It's!) and then added in some of our best honeymoon shots.

This is what I came up with via http://www.shutterfly.com/.  I truly love this site.  They have a lot of templates and color/style options and are so user friendly and somewhat affordable.  You can often find coupon codes by doing a google search for a percent off your order or free shipping.  Which I of course did :)

The inside of the card looks like this:

I then would write little captions next to each of the pictures above saying things like "On our balcony" or "Hiking in the rainforest" so they knew what was going on or where the pic was taken.

The bottom half of the inside of the card was where I would write my message.  My sister laughed at me when she saw that I was 'writing a novel' to every one of our guests filling the entire bottom half of the page.  But what can I say?  I do not like thank you cards that say something like:

Dear John,

Just wanted to thank you so much for the wonderful gift of the toaster you gave us at the wedding.  It really was something we both wanted and we really appreciate it.  Thanks for celebrating our special day with us.

Love, the Beevers

Nah, that's boring and while nice and to the point, I like to write something a little more personal to each guest.  So most of my cards looked something like this:

Hi, Omar & Tracy!

John and I just wanted to let you know what a joy it was to have you there celebrating our special day with us.  We had so much fun at our wedding and it looks like you both did, too from the photobooth pictures we saw!  I heard you saw an amazing trick the magician performed for you, too.  And I so appreciate the photos that you posted on Facebook to share with us.  We love them!  And we love you, too.  We were overwhelmed by your very generous gift of $100 to help make our honeymoon dreams come true.  We shared some pictures above to show you how great it was.  Hopefully we can get together soon to catch up.  Take care and thank you again so very much.

Stacey & John

Or for an actual gift, I would switch out the line about the honeymoon dreams with something like:

I can't tell you how grateful we were for the new Martha Stewart knife set you gave us.  We really needed a new set and I use it every single day...especially to slice the veggies for my famous garlic roasted potatoes that John loves.  We'll have to have you over for dinner some time to catch up.

Or you can switch out the line about the magician with something like "We loved seeing you tear it up on the dance floor which just made us enjoy ourselves so much more!"

So, what do you think, ladies?  Am I truly anal and an over achiever?  Because it takes me forever to write these out and my hand is killing me after only a few! 

TODAY'S WEDDING TIP:  Start writing thank you cards as soon after the wedding as you can..maybe even on your honeymoon while lounging on a beach somewhere?  I don't like the old idea that you have up to a year to send them out...but since it is a daunting task, I have allowed myself the option to only write 5 or 6 thank you cards each day or two (or three).  I started about a couple weeks ago and I seriously have about 85 cards to write!  UGH, thankfully, I've only got about 37 or so to go!