Do you mention the christening itself, or is that ancient history by the time of a big birthday?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nOnly if you have an actual detail from it, in which case it is one of the best things you can put in the card. Who held whom, what the weather did, the argument about the name, the fact that nobody present had the faintest idea what they were agreeing to \u2014 those are family history and they work because they are specific. What does not work is the generic version, the promise you made all those years ago, which is filler dressed as sentiment and reads as though you could not think of anything. If you were not there or nobody has ever told you the story, skip it entirely and write about something you remember first-hand. Borrowed nostalgia is transparent on paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Does thanking them on their birthday turn the card into a thank-you note?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt can, and the difference is where the gratitude sits. A card that is entirely thanks reads as a summing-up, and summing-up is what people do when something is finishing \u2014 which is not the note you want on a milestone. Put one specific thank-you in the middle, keep it to a single thing rather than a list, and let the card open and close on the birthday itself. That ordering matters more than the wording. The other useful move is to write about them in the present tense somewhere: what they are like now, not only what they did when you were nine. A godparent on a round number is being quietly reassured that the role has not become historical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You are one of several godchildren, and they will all be sending something. How do you write one that is not interchangeable?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWrite about the version of them that only you got. Godparents behave differently with each godchild \u2014 one gets taken to the football, one gets the difficult conversations, one gets rescued from a station at midnight \u2014 and none of those overlap. Name yours, in one line, with the detail intact. Everything else in the card can be ordinary. What makes a card interchangeable is not the phrasing but the fact that it describes a general quality: kind, generous, always there. Every sibling and cousin will supply those, and the pile on the mantelpiece will read as one long paragraph. A single unshared detail is worth more than a page of correct adjectives, and it is the one nobody else can write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A fiftieth and an eightieth are very different occasions. What changes between them?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe direction of the card, rather than the warmth in it. At fifty the person is mid-stride, so the natural material is what they are still doing, and a card that looks only backwards can read like an early retirement notice they did not ask for. At eighty, looking back is not merely safe but wanted, and one specific old memory outperforms any amount of general good wishing. The wish at the end shifts with it. Wishing a busy fifty-year-old a quiet year is a joke; wishing an eighty-year-old the same thing is a kindness. Match the wish to the life actually being lived and the rest of the card arranges itself around it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Your godparent never had children of their own. Does that change what the card should say?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt raises the stakes of the card without changing a word of the advice, and the trap is trying to acknowledge it. Anything along the lines of you were like a parent to me, or we were the family you never had, hands them a comparison they did not invite and can only agree with awkwardly. Say what the relationship gave you rather than what it substituted for. The other thing worth knowing is that a card from a godchild in this situation is often one of very few that arrive from a younger generation, so it is read more carefully than you would expect and kept longer. That is an argument for handwriting it and for saying the thing you have been putting off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Godparent is one of the few titles in British life that can mean almost nothing or almost everything, and the difference is decided entirely by what happened after the christening. If yours is the second sort \u2014 the adult who turned up to the school play, who was easier to ring than a parent, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":574,"featured_media":5239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3822],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/574"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5238"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5242,"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5238\/revisions\/5242"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5238"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=5238"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=5238"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=5238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}