When wedding thank-you cards should go out

Where the “you have a year” idea came from

You will see this repeated confidently on wedding forums. It is a garbled version of an old etiquette convention about how long a guest had to send a gift - not how long a couple had to acknowledge one. Nobody who is waiting for a card is counting to twelve months.

The workable rule is three months. It is long enough to absorb a honeymoon and the fortnight of flatness that follows a wedding, and short enough that you still remember who gave you the serving bowl.

A schedule that survives contact with reality

• As gifts arrive beforehand. Thank each one within a fortnight. These are usually from people who cannot attend, and a card that arrives while they are still thinking about your wedding lands much better than one that arrives in the bulk batch two months later.
• The week before the wedding. Address the envelopes for the guest list you already have. Addressing is the half of the job that feels like admin; getting it out of the way makes the writing feel like writing.
• The week after. Do not write cards. Do build the list - who came, who gave what, who travelled. Do it now, while you can still reconstruct it from the gift table and the seating plan. Couples who skip this step are the ones still guessing in November.
• Weeks three to eight. Write them, in batches, by group. Sorting the pile by what each guest did is what stops the twentieth card sounding like the first.
• By week twelve. Posted.

If you are already late

Most people reading this are here. The recovery is simple and it is not what people expect:

1. Do not lead with the apology. Opening on “sorry this has taken so long” makes the card about your admin rather than their gift, and the guest now has to reassure you. If you want to acknowledge it, do it in one short clause near the end.
2. Write about the gift in the present tense. Six months of use is an advantage you did not have at week three - you now know the bowl gets used every Sunday. That is a better card than the one you would have written in April.
3. Send them all at once. Do not triage into “too late to bother”. The gap between a late card and no card is enormous; the gap between three months and eight is small.

Australian postage, briefly

Card-sized envelopes go at the standard letter rate if they stay under 20g and within the small-letter dimensions, which most thank-you cards do until you add a thick card stock or a photograph. A rigid or bulky card is charged as a large letter. Current rates are on the Australia Post site.

Two things worth knowing. Allow extra time for international guests - a card to the UK or the US is a fortnight or more, so work backwards from your three months if you want them to land inside it. And buy the stamps in one go: running out at card sixty is a genuinely common reason the second half of the pile never goes.

The realistic time cost

A hundred cards, written properly, is two to three evenings of actual writing plus the addressing. Two hundred is closer to a week of evenings, and it is the single most abandoned job in Australian weddings - not because couples do not care, but because it lands in the exact fortnight when everything else also lands.

Knowing that in advance is most of the solution. If the pile is bigger than the time you have, there are four ways through it, and only one of them is “write faster”.