You gotta do the thank you notes. I did 'em, and I’m the laziest person in the world. My shower was pizza in the park with my co-workers, and I wrote each of them a personalized thank-you note. I bought them at the grocery store, so they were not fancy at all. I did it because I actually felt gratitude for them taking time out of their lives, chipping in for a gift, and wishing me well.
Don’t psych yourself out-- it’s not that hard and it doesn’t take that long. Three sentences, exactly what Beadalin said in Post #67. No big deal. Write them while you’re watching TV. You can do 5 per commercial break, using Beadalin’s template for each note, and it’ll be done before you know it. The good will it engenders will outweigh the dread you feel at doing it. Also, get pre-printed return address labels with your address on them so you don’t have to do that all by hand.
For your wedding, when you order your invites (assuming you haven’t already done this), order the thank you notes at the same time. They are nice, engraved with your name and your husband’s. I figure I’ll make myself do 10-15 a day for a week and it’ll be done. I would feel horribly guilty if I didn’t do things like this-- people are giving me MONEY and MERCHANDISE just for marrying the guy I love! They deserve recognition for that, IMO. I know you probably feel the same way, you’re just freaking out right now, feeling coerced and resented, and very short in time. Breathe. You can do it.
I loathe showers. And I know that I resisted having one before our wedding.
But I also know that I can’t remember it at all. In other words, I survived.
And I know I wrote thank yous because my hand was still sore when it came time to do the wedding thank yous. Ow.
OP, while I’m behind the sentiment, you are coming off snide. No skin off my nose, of course.
ETA: The thank you template is great, but be sure not to thank someone for coming if they didn’t come. I actually wrote a thank you like that and my husband caught it. That would have been a tad embarrassing.
I heart personal attacks. I wondered when it would get to this point. My oldest friend DID actually email her gift (ordered it online and it was sent to our house), and I emailed her a “thanks for the plates, sorry you can’t come” back.
To answer your question, I’m exquisite in RL. As for marriage involving all sorts of things I don’t want to do, I’m perfectly aware. I can be outwardly gracious while inwardly resenting the fuck out of it. I don’t think at any point it involves me liking it. I’m just being honest, so if it comes across snide, oh well. I know perfectly well how to act, and I know that letting my real feelings out is healthy. I’m not down with repression.
Most people simply are terrible actors, and most other people will pick up on all of the nonverbal cues.
Being polite and being gracious are two different things to me. You can be polite while gritting your teeth. I don’t think it’s really possible to be both resentful and gracious.
But I wasn’t saying you came across as snide for not wanting a shower. I’m saying it for your behavior in this thread. You said you weren’t going to do thank you notes, then snarled at people for taking you at your word. You say you don’t notice not getting thank you notes, then you list the number of times you haven’t gotten them.
This isn’t a “personal attack” to “heart or not heart.” Just an observation.
BTW, I like showers. I like the friends ones where you give stupid presents and make fun of shower games by playing them. I like the ones your aunt gives you where you see relatives you haven’t seen for two years and get a chance to chat. I like the one your MIL gives so she can show off the fact that someone is actually willing to marry her son (“you all said he’d never amount to anything”). I love the dynamics of showers, the people watching - both the dirt and the joy.
You know, I do too - and when my son is ready to marry, I hope to have a shower for his bride to be - it will be my only chance to participate in a shower for one of my children as he’s an only child.
You’re supposed to give/get thank you notes for shower gifts? We don’t do that here (thank god) - just for the wedding gifts. Flea, I offer you temporary Canadian citizenship for the duration of your pre-nuptual period.
Thank you notes for all gifts of course! But the OP says she is sending them, just that she doesn’t like them, so what’s the big deal? Not going to change her opinion…but as long as she’s sending them, who cares?
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.
Heh. Well, let’s just amend Beadalin’s template…AND add a provision for the now-ubiquitous gift card…
Choose one from each category:
1a. Thank you so much for the lovely [item].
1b. Thank you so much for the generous gift card.
2a. We will use it to do .
2b. It will look beautiful on our .
2c. We will put it toward [something worthy].
3a. It was great to see you at the shower – I’m so glad you were there.
3b. I’m so sorry that you couldn’t be at the shower, but I’m looking forward to seeing you at the wedding.
3c. I’m so sorry that you couldn’t be at the shower. Hopefully, I’ll see you soon.
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.
I think they are left from an era and class where we had time for the social nicities of a note, and much was done by note. You’d visit and leave your card if no one was home because you couldn’t call. Gifts were not opened in front of the person who gave it to you, and wedding gifts and the like were sent under seperate cover.
Certainly, people should be thanked for their gift, but we are sending thank you notes because we are taught we should. In an era of phone and email, where you open your gift in front of your guests, thank you notes are a quaint tradition. There isn’t any reason why a phone call or email or thanking them in person shouldn’t carry the same information. But a thank you note still carries weight. I don’t know for how much longer. I suspect within a generation they will be limited to wedding gifts (because people pull out old ettiquitte for weddings) and few people will send them for any other occation
I now want to get married and get presents, just because I now really, really want to send everyone a card that says “Thank you so much for the Monkey.”
Thank-you notes aren’t for the people who you’ll thank in a million other ways. If my mom gets me a gift, I call her up and say “thanks.” When I get my 4-year old nephew something, he gives me a hug and “thank you” next time I see him. I don’t expect thank-you cards from friends when I impulse buy something I know they’d like.
But a lot of people invited to showers and weddings aren’t people you have causal (or, any) relationships with. They’re friends of the MiL, distant relatives, co-workers of somebody, etc. Those are the people you send thank-you cards to – because you’re not going to be talking to them, otherwise, to thank you.
If somebody wants to give in-person or by-phone thank yous to gift-givers, more power to 'em. Or simply ban from attendance anyone who is not a bosom companion. Otherwise, man up and write the damn cards. One sentence. Your signature. Address and stamp. How hard is that?
That’s why everybody gossips about people who don’t send thank-you cards – it’s freakin’ easy and they damn well know that your mother raised you better than that*.
substitute appropriate developmental authority figure, if necessary.
