The Closer

(Please note-- this is not a rant as much as tongue in cheek-- especially since this affects a few of my dear readers :))

I'm not sure if I ever blogged about this, or I just planned out the post in my head ages ago, and never wrote it. I have a silly tendency towards that. Oh, how many times I've said to someone, "did I tell you....???"

Here's my thing. I'm a bit of a Renaissance girl. Now, before you get the wrong idea, I love my jeans and I'm lucky to be able to find my makeup, let alone put it on, but I kinda miss the notion of "social necessities."

Like an understood, mandatory cocktail hour. Am I right, ladies ;)

Anywhoo, I was the humble recipient of some baby gifts from several lovely ladies this weekend. Knowing my horrific procrastination tendencies, I decided to go ahead and write out my thank you notes ASAP and send them off before the baby is two and a half months old and I wake up for a mid-night feeding, only to look at a certain receiving blanket and realize that once again, I am a schmuck, and never sent out the notes.

So I did them.

Wherein does the problem lie, you ask?

The closing.

Once upon a time, when people knew exactly what to wear when an invitation said "semi-formal", people also knew exactly how to close a letter based on the type of relationship they had with the recipient. Nowadays, a waitress who doesn't know you from Adam will call you honey before she bothers to get your first name.

And I won't tell you how much it irked me to be called "Sweetie" by the midwife who used to work at my OB's office.

But, I digress.

For the most part, these are my friends, or at least people I'm very friendly with. But, how do you sign off?? "Love," is too much, unless you've spent enough quality time with the person in close quarters such as, "an apartment," "Campion Hall," or "Mom and Dad's house," and you're still speaking to one another after the experience. :) "Your friend" is too blase', or eight grade, and if I'm going to go that far, I may as well take it to, "Your BFF, ...." and write the entire note in "text".

Then, there's the personalized closings. "Blessings" seems pretty popular around here, but since I heard the first time, I always associate it with that friend, and just see it as her closing. I'll fess up-- I stole it this time. I was at a loss.

Then you have the, "Yours in Christ," or "In His service" people. To me, unless you're a consecrated religious, this seems a bit much.

It gets better. Jon has gotten emails from others in cub scouts signed, "YIS." We finally decoded this to mean, "yours in scouting."

Ummm.......

I like Jon's idea. He's considering signing off on his work emails with, "can I get an Amen?" That's all we're looking for, right? Just a little affirmation of what we wrote.

What do you think-- got any ideas for me??