[QUOTE=Rubystreak]
I can’t believe there is any controversy here. Someone gives you a nice gift, you send a thank you note. The occasion (shower, wedding, whatever) is irrelevant.
[/QUOTE]
I’m going to say something here; I feel like I’m confessing something horrible and evil, but here it is anyway:
I think thank-you notes, as a concept, are one of the two or three most ridiculous customs still extant in our society, a practice that manages to inconvenience everyone involved in the transaction while offering genuine and meaningful benefit to none.
Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t write 'em. Oh, I do. Write 'em for every gift I’ve ever received. Abandon traditional gender roles under which men foist this task on their wives and write 'em right along with mine. I write the sincere ones - the ones where the gift was clearly chosen with an enormous amount of thought by someone whose presence in my life is of itself a gift, and where my gratitude is considerable, personal (and has already been expressed in person, upon receipt of the gift and half a dozen times over since then). I write the others, too, and work laboriously to ensure that each one has a personal touch even if the gift came from someone I have literally never met. I am a damn thank-you note writing machine. And I hand write every one, to better to ensure that no one would ever think of me as rude or ungrateful.
But I hate them, hate them, hate them, with a depth of feeling I usually reserve for, say, eating scorpions.
I hate them because they represent fulfillment of obligation rather than any kind of genuine expression of gratitude. I must send them, or I will be thought a barbarian who probably eats with his feet, so the sentiment that might characterize a non-required thank-you is obliterated. By sending the card I am saying, “you have given me gift X, and in return I am required to spend ten minutes scrawling a generic expression of possibly but not definitely sincere thanks. I have now done so; my obligation is discharged. Let us speak of this no more.”
I hate them because if I give you a gift, it is a gift. I gave it to you because I like you, respect you, care about you, whatever - I did not give it to you in the expectation that you would give me something in return. I just went to a wedding and gave the bride and groom, friends both, a pretty nice gift. I wanted so badly to beg them not to send me a thank you card. Spend that ten minutes enjoying one another’s company, I wanted to say, or watching a stupid TV show, or learning to make apple garlic soup.
I hate them because actual gratitude is so much better expressed in a million other ways. At the wedding I just attended, at the end of the night I thanked the bride and groom for sharing the evening with me; they thanked me for coming, and “for everything.” There was hugging. From them, a thank you card is superfluous; I know they appreciate my (and my wife’s) friendship, our presence, and our gift, without getting a note that will be #123 of 350, just one more pain in the ass and the writing hand. At another wedding I attended recently, it was plain that I was an “obligation invite,” and that the bride and groom could not have cared less whether or not I was there. They sent a thank-you note, which meant literally nothing.
I wish everyone in the world could simply agree to stop writing thank-you notes, all at once. We’d save paper, money, time, and cramping, and the net amount of genuine kindness and gratitude in the world wouldn’t change a bit.
Sorry for the rant. I *really * hate thank-you notes. That is all.
