Wedding Favors As Thank You Notes?

Posted by on May 17, 2011

When your wedding day eventually arrives, you can finally relax & take some time to admire all your hard work. All the months of wedding planning, phone calls, meetings & decision making, have finally resulted in your perfect dream wedding. When you arrive at the reception to be greeted by all your guests, you will no doubt take some time to mingle & thank them for coming. The majority of brides will also have taken the time & trouble to put together a small wedding favor as a token of thanks for coming to the wedding. Then as the day moves into evening & evening into night, you wave goodbye to your guests & drive away with your new husband on your honeymoon.

After you return from honeymoon, you will then begin the wonderful task of opening all your wedding presents. All the beautiful gifts selected for you by your guests to wish you well on your wedding day. Common wedding etiquette would dictate that at this point you should begin to write your thank you cards, with a personal note thanking your guests for their lovely & generous gifts. For many brides what starts out as a fun task quickly becomes tedious as you realize there are so many to write, address & post. You could ask your husband to lend a hand, however, he may well point out that you have already thanked the guests – ‘isn’t that what all those little favor thingy’s were for?’.

It is a good point. Having given your guests a token of thanks already by way of a wedding favor, is it really necessary to write all these cards to say thank you all over again?

Wedding etiquette dictates that wedding favors are a token of thanks to your guests merely for attending the wedding & not for the gift they or may not have given you yet. Wedding favors therefore should not be used as a substitute for a personal note of thanks for the wedding present. You may also have several guests who couldn’t attend the wedding but did take the time & trouble to send you a wedding present. So your thank you notes should be sent out to all those that sent you a present, whether they attended the wedding or not.

Whilst writing out all those little cards is a time consuming task & one which you may quickly grow tired of, it is important that you send them. Many of your guests will be expecting them; some will want to know that you liked the gift they chose & others would appreciate the thought.

When it comes to sending out your thank you notes you should try to get them sent out within two weeks of receiving the gift. Of course there maybe occasions when this isn’t possible – perhaps you had a long honeymoon or was busy moving into your new home; in this instance aim to get them sent within one month. It is worth remembering that a ‘thank you’ is always welcomed, no matter how long it takes you to do it.

by Mae Andrea