Thank you notes

After all the gifts have been opened, after all the food has been eaten, after all the relatives have been seen, and after the mess has been cleaned up, there is still one last detail to attend to: Writing thank you letters.

I do understand the etiquette in properly thanking people who have been generous enough to give me presents during Christmas. However, I had issues with sending letters to people who were there when I received the present and whom I had already thanked in person. This was the part that simply did not make sense.

For the first several years that I was growing up, we spent Christmas Eve at Grandma Bend's with Aunt Mard, Uncle Ord and Aunt Cind. We would open packages one at a time. After I opened each package and saw what was inside, I would express my gratitude right there and then in front of everybody. I had witnesses, but that didn't matter to my Mom, who forced Loyd and me to sit down and write the letters.

Most etiquette guides and advice columnists will say that the letter does not need to be very long. According to them, all you have to do is write a brief note mentioning the gift and letting them know you appreciate them thinking about you. Mom did not see it that way. We had to write long letters that detailed how much we appreciated the gift and what we were going to do with it. We also had to write and let them know what else we did during the holidays, how we were doing in school and how our family was doing.

She also did not want us writing "form" responses. Every letter had to be completely different. I can only assume this is how she was taught to write thank you notes by Grandma Bend and she felt that Loyd and I had to do the exact same thing.

Considering that my mother cannot be the only parent on this planet who inflicted this on her children, is it any wonder that we have generations of people who don't write thank you notes, or at the very least, look at them as some sort of insurmountable task?

Before, it was considered tacky to call and thank someone over the phone. No, a note had to be sent as it was the proper thing to do. I guess they came up with that rule when they had the postal service and the telegraph. When the telephone was invented, no one old enough wanted to sway from it because they had to write everything out and didn't have modern technology to make the etiquette easier to handle. They wanted everyone to suffer the same fate.

It seems we have the same problem with e-mail and texting nowdays. Those are certainly viable options for acknowledging receipt of gifts, but the older people will not accept them. Since this stubbornness goes back beyond the telephone, I'm surpised we don't have to carve thank you notes on stone tablets and mail those out.

One of these days, we'll be able to transmit our thank yous through thought control, but there will still be people who will want everybody to write letters.