After all, the celebration is over and life smacks you square in the face, you realize all those wonderful loving people deserved to be thanked for not only celebrating in your love at the ceremony of a lifetime but for the generous gifts that they gave you! 

Ok, great! let's back up a bit... Because a couple of simple steps will help to make this process so much easier! 

Number 1. Before you even send out wedding invitations get the addresses into a system that will make everything easier. For the most part, if you put your addresses into an excel file you can share this with different programs to make your life so much easier. So even if you hire a calligrapher to address your invitations or plan on printing out address labels this will make sharing that information so much easier. Plus you will have this on hand for future Holiday Cards!

Number 2. Upload the address excel file to a program like Avery. With Avery, you can purchase printer labels for your home printer and voila! Done! you can also create return address labels and this makes life so much easier from here on out! Don't forget to put your new name if you intend on changing it. 

Number 3. Ok so now you are all set up and you are on your honeymoon basking in the glow of being a newlywed. Life is great! You open your presents and cards filled with money and gift certificates and keeping track is difficult. Most people use a system with a note pad writing out who gave what.

Now if you are like me and haven't planned any of these things and you are going to be opening up your gifts, you might do what I did. Instead of putting it down in a notebook  (I didn't think that far in advance and didn't have one handy).  I wrote on the cards that were attached to the gifts and the cards that came with money or gift cards. On the envelopes or on the card I wrote what the item was and who it was from if I couldn't tell by the handwriting. Later when I was writing I simply pulled out the cards and wrote my Thankyou notes. It wasn't the best way, but it worked in a pinch and to this day I have all of our cards. 

If you have any tips that worked for you please share!