Are thank you cards a thing of the past?

For me, the daughter of small business owners, winter and the holidays meant more family time at the dining table, not just to eat but to handwrite thank you notes to our customers.

My brother would climb up to the attic to bring down bins full of greeting cards my mother and I had purchased the previous year after Christmas, when the holiday clearance sections at local stores offered boxes and boxes of them for 75% off.

My father, a mechanic, would come home from a long, hard day of work at his auto repair shop, change out of his clothes and pick up a pen with his cracked, chapped hands to spend the last few hours of the day writing thanks.

Thank you for being our customer. Thank you for trusting us with your car. Thank you for your loyalty.

I was as young as 10 or 11 when I joined this tradition. At that age, my penmanship was not very impressive, but that was never the point. The point was to take time to communicate our gratitude in writing.

I now teach writing at Harvard, a place where no one seems to have enough time. Students are always running out of it: They need more time to study, research, write and meet deadlines. Teachers are always wishing they had more of it. If only we had more time to return papers, more time to conference with students.

In a place where there’s never enough time, it’s easy to lose small gestures like thanking someone in writing, even in a writing class.

So when an opportunity presented itself, I took it. My class had two sessions outside of our usual classroom. The first was at Lamont Library, where we learned how to conduct research. The second was at the Harvard Art Museums, where we went on a tour to help us start thinking about art and objects as primary sources. Of course, we thanked both the librarian and the research curator in person and offered a round of applause at the end of each class. But I found it important to also thank our instructors in writing.

The following week, I walked to CVS in Harvard Square to pick up two thank you cards so that students could write in them. I was shocked, first by how few thank you cards there were (I saw just three on a wall full of birthday, baby and wedding cards) and second, by the options available for purchase. One card simply stated: “Thank You for Being My Person.”

According to the Greeting Card Assn., Americans purchase around 6.5 billion cards each year. Unsurprisingly, birthday cards make up more than half of those sales. But thank you cards rank at third place, making the lack of options I encountered all the more confusing.

What I thought would be a five-minute errand resulted in me scurrying from one store to another for the next hour, desperately seeking a decent card.

Of course, I could have purchased a “blank inside” card, but the absence of designated thank you cards troubled me. It felt like a sign that we don’t know who to thank and what to thank them for.

Have we stopped thanking people? Do we do it by email or text now? Has it become too complicated in our technology-driven world to search for and buy a card, write by hand and then give or mail it to someone? Or have we simply stopped being thankful?

Perhaps my Harvard Square experience is an anomaly. But even so, it’s worth paying attention to: If gratitude is missing in a college town, what lessons could we expect our students to pass on to future generations?

My parents taught me early on that there is a difference between saying thank you and writing thanks. The spoken thank you is fleeting — not to say that it’s meaningless, but extending thanks in writing makes it more intentional, more thoughtful, a sort of archived gratitude that doesn’t expire, a moment you could return to.

In the end, it was at Bob Slate Stationer, a small business in Harvard Square, where I finally found a vibrant selection of thank you cards to choose from. The one I selected stated, “I want to thank you in writing.” With a Sharpie, I turned the “I” into a “We,” and asked my students to spend the last few minutes of our class writing thanks. Some wrote brief notes while others wrote thank you in their native languages, including Ukrainian and Choctaw.

I’m not your writing teacher, but I have a suggestion for you. The next time someone does you a solid, take a moment to slow down. Go looking for a thank you card and write to them. They might seem small, these businesses, these moments, these gestures, this lesson. But the bigger picture looks less promising without them.

Taleen Mardirossian was raised in Torrance and currently lives in Cambridge, where she teaches writing at Harvard University. She is working on a collection of essays about the body and identity.