Card ideas
What to write
in a 60th birthday card.
A milestone birthday card is hard because the milestone gets in the way. Nobody wants to read another 'welcome to the over-sixties club'. Here is what people actually keep.
From a son or daughter
- You taught me to drive in a car with a handbrake that did nothing. I passed first time. Both facts still amaze me.
- Sixty years and you have never once let me leave the house without asking if I had a coat.
- I have been pretending to be you in difficult meetings for about a decade now. It works.
- Thank you for the thirty one years of me. I know what they cost.
From a friend
- Forty years of friendship and you still owe me a fiver from 2011.
- You have been sixty in spirit since roughly 1994 and it has always suited you.
- Nobody makes a room laugh the way you do about three minutes after everyone decided the night was over.
- We have been through two divorces, one redundancy and a canal boat between us. Here is to the next bit.
From a grandchild
- GRANDAD YOU ARE THE BEST AT FISHING AND ALSO AT PANCAKES
- You always let us have the fizzy one. Mum still does not know.
- Happy birthday. You are the oldest person I like.
From a colleague
- Sixty and still the first one in. It is intimidating and I wish you would stop.
- You have forgotten more about this industry than I have learned. Happy birthday.
What makes a good one
One memory beats one joke
They have had the jokes. They have not had your version of the memory.
Use their name
Cards that start with the person's name get read twice.
Do not mention age twice
Once is a nod. Twice is a theme, and not a good one.
Write it how you would say it
If you would not say it out loud, it will read as a card.
Questions
One specific thing they did for you that they probably think you did not notice. Those are the lines people keep in a drawer.
No, but once is plenty. The joke about being sixty has been made to them by everyone else in the pile.
Say the one true thing you do know. 'You always ask after my mum and you always remember her name' is worth more than a paragraph of generic warmth.
Or do not use a card.
A card gets four names and no stories. Send one link instead and everyone writes properly, on their own, without reading what the person above put. Free, and nobody you send it to has to sign up.