A No-Tech, High Touch Thanksgiving

If you read this column before, you know that for years my focus has been on high-tech issues. Today, though, for the first time ever, I’m writing about no-tech, as in going no-tech for Thanksgiving.

Several years ago I read an article by a man who (as I recall, which is all that matters) survived a usually fatal disease and found himself incredibly thankful. Thanksgiving was coming up, and he realized he felt thankful to dozens of people who had helped him in life, and most importantly – he hadn’t thanked any of them.

His solution was to sit down and start hand writing Thanksgiving cards that included hand written thanks, with details. He wrote out of his own need to give thanks, without any expectations. His results were enormously unexpected. He wrote, for example, a detailed thank you to a wonderful grade school teacher he’d had – just finding her address was a challenge and he finally tracked her down at a nursing home. Just a couple of weeks later, he got a card back from her that nearly made him cry. She wrote that she was alone, having lost her family, her health failing. She was feeling forgotten, and then his thank you card arrived. It made her believe that in her 40 year career as a teacher surely there must be many other students who were also thankful, as perhaps he had told her in his card. His card made her day, week, month and life bright. She kept the card in her room permanently displayed, smiling when she saw it, an impact, 100 fold.

That year, for Thanksgiving, I started writing thank you cards, about 75 that first year, trying to thank all the people I could think of – those still living – that I should thank, with some detail about how they’d helped me. Like the man who’s article I’d read, I expected no response.

Now, all these years later, I have many surprises of my own to report. One of my first thank-you’s went to a man who’d shown great leadership in my son’s school. More than a year later, I happened to see him in a restaurant. A big bear of a man. Construction guy. He immediately came over and gave me a hug that I thought might break ribs and nearly brought tears to my eyes. Then he held me back (possibly still off the ground) and said, “That note you wrote me was the nicest thing anyone ever said to me in my entire life. I feel the same way about you.” The tears in his eyes were of another kind altogether.

Another surprise for me is that each year my list gets longer. You might think it would be enough for me to thank my friend Dave just once for being a great friend for more than 20 years. It isn’t. Some people I owe a life-time of thank-you’s to. Dave’s one of them.

After a few years of writing Thanksgiving cards, I ordered extra cards and brought my young staff into my office. I told them the original school teacher story, and my bear hug and tears story, handed them five cards each, and commanded them to write thank you cards to five people who deserved thanks for touching their lives. “But not me,” I added, in case they thought this assignment was testing them on an even weirder level than they already perceived it.

They smiled pleasantly, nodded, left my office, placed their cards on their desk tops – and left them there for days. Another meeting in my office. “You’re not writing yet,” I pointed out. “What’s the problem? No one to thank?”

They looked down at their feet, up into the corners of my office. Shook their heads. No, that wasn’t it. They had people to thank, all right.

Do it now, I commanded. One card. Surely you can think of one thing your mom or dad did for you. Or a teacher, a friend, someone. “Be specific. Write, ‘Thanks for bringing that can of gas to me when I ran out on the Interstate at 2 AM...’ or whatever.”

Off they went. They begin to write. I tried not to pace up and down beside their desks. Eventually, the five cards disappeared. I am still surprised by how difficult this is for young people. But, thankfully, not for all of them. This year, just the other day, a card arrived in the mail for our office. From a former employee, in the Air Force now, a pilot. “I didn’t want to stop the Thanksgiving card tradition,” he wrote, “so I have kept it going by writing this one to all of you.” Then he wrote two paragraphs of thanks to us about how we’d helped him in the year he’d been with us.

A couple of days ago I had lunch with a semi-retired man who thanked me for my Thanksgiving card and added that just a couple of years earlier, he’d written a detailed thank you card, at Thanksgiving, to his brother. They’re both in their 70’s. He wrote, he said, about how thankful he was to have him as a brother and “said things I’d never said to him before.” Then his brother wrote a Thanksgiving card back, with his reasons he was glad to have my friend as his brother. The cards, my friend told me, “changed the nature of our relationship forever.”

Yesterday I received a thank you back from my former pastor, Frank, who moved to California years ago. I mention this because I need to point out that there are some people we can’t thank with a card. Either we can’t find them, or they’ve died. They are gone now. I think Frank would say that we can tell God why we’re thankful to them, and God will pass the message along.

So my high-tech advice for Thanksgiving is to go no-tech, and to hand write five thank you’s to people you know. Hand address the envelope, too. People love that.

One woman wrote me back and said, “You’re the only person who’s ever sent me a Thanksgiving card with a thank-you note. I’m really touched.” Now it’s your turn to touch someone. Do.