Introducing the Thanksgiving Card 2026

In the beginning, there was a rumpled young artist with pretty handwriting who composed a poem for Thanksgiving, then painstakingly copied it out by hand, over and over, for mailing out to those people for whom she was grateful that year.

Fourteen years later, the budget for this poetic ritual has thankfully enlarged to commercial printing of the card, albeit in limited edition. Zoe's photography and design skills have also joined the mix: she now personally crafts everything about the card except the wood pulp. All these years later, the concept remains the same: a poem, written specifically for the occasion of Thanksgiving, shared by Zoe Marie Bel with those for whom she is thankful.

Riffle through the back catalog of the card and you'll see that only once has the poem actually been about big-T Thanksgiving, or, for that matter, little-t thanksgiving. (You can read that one poem in Zoe's 2024 collection Foothills: Poems and Two Love Stories.) For topics the card has covered instead, spin a bottle on a dictionary - Zoe can wax lyrical, it seems, on any darned thing under the sun.

You can find out more about the Thanksgiving Poem concept in this brief and very pink video of Zoe from 2023.

Every year, there are folks deserving of thanks who end up getting a hyperlink to these pages instead. This is generally for practical reasons such as: mistaking the 'gimme your mailing address for a poem' message for a hideous reappearance of that one-night stand from that ill-advised pottery class; or living beyond the reach of the postal service, for example in a cryogenic state until after the next election. To those folks, please know that in a perfect world, you too would have received the physical card.