We drove for a day and a half solid to get to Maine for our honeymoon. My handwriting is, to be charitable, the stuff of profound muscular dysfunction. I write like a boy.
The wife, newly minted, has zero creative writing skills but is possessed with excellent penmanship. By the time we got to Maine, all of the thank-you notes had been written and enveloped. People got theirs postmarked “Boothbay Harbor, Maine” .
It’s been a downhill slide since then, however.
Agreed. In some circumstances, I will also send written thank you notes to gifts delivered in person and opened at the time. They are really appreciated.
Honestly, for all the moaning and complaining I hear from some older relatives about sending thank you cards, they seem more upset that I have not followed social form than they do that they have not recieved a “thank you”. It’s great that I was sent a gift, really it is. However, when gift sending grandparents/aunts and uncles/extended family etc. come to town and I offer to have them over to my place (which they have never seen in the two years I have lived here) and cook dinner or take them to a play or a movie I am turned down because “It’s only a 4 hour drive to shreveport from here” or “We are only in town for 2 weeks and we need to make sure to go to every mall in the area” or some bullshit like that it really makes me think that I am sent gifts because my family and friends believe they should send them, not because they were thinking of me. It isn’t that they don’t love me, because I know with all of my heart that they care about me very much, but honestly I would much rather forgo the picture frame or the blanket or whatever and actually spend time with them, and I think that is something that older adults aren’t really noticing.
“So, recently my niece graduated from high school; an event followed about a week and a half later by her 18th birthday. I figured, okay, even I can’t ignore this, so I got her a $100 Amazon gift certificate.”
Essentially what this tells me is that you have been avoiding sending gifts because of a lack of thank-you notes, which you do not mention telling her about, and then you send a gift not because you care but because it would be uncouth for you not to send something for such an important event in her life. It is nice that you sent the gift, but apparently you didn’t do it out of joy or kindness, but it was send begrudgingly. Why should you, or anybody else, be thanked for that?
My nephews are somewhat younger than the OP’s but they send thank you notes. Probably prodded on by their parents, especially my sister, as we were always told to write in acknowledgement of a gift.
I don’t care if the practice has become “uncommon” to some, it’s still the right thing to do.
Why should you withhold a “thank you” based on what you perceive to be my intentions, rather than what the effect of my actions are on your life?
Thank you notes are essential to civilized co-existing. Mom taught me to write notes “if you hope to ever get a gift from them again”. I agree.
I’m teaching my own to send thank you notes. They may once in awhile come in the form of an email, but a handwritten note from a five-year-old is just so darn precious and now’s the time to ingrain it.
It’s a crappy feeling when you have to wonder if the gift was received. My grandfather had a habit of leaving the envelopes unsealed on birthday cards. Rarely was there money in there, but maybe he wanted us to think there WAS and that someone stole it out of the open envelope. No clue; Gramps is weird when it comes to money. In fact, Gramps is just plain weird. I’d just jot off a note and include a pic of the kids to acknowledge we received his card.
Well, people who don’t write thank-you notes are free to not write thank-you notes. Just be aware that as time goes by, I will be way less inclined to send gifts, and eventually won’t send them at all. If you’re OK with that, then I’m OK with not getting a note. But then people complain they didn’t get a gift from so-and-so.
I, too, was raised to believe that thank-yous are mandatory if you don’t open the gift in front of the giver. It’s just the nice thing to do. And besides, I know how good it makes me feel to get an actual paper note in the mail. Yeah, for friends my age (late-20s) I send emails. But I know an awful lot of older people, not just relatives, and many of them don’t have email. So I send hand-written notes. And when I get a hand-written note in return, it makes me feel really good. I actually get something besides bills in the mail! How cool is that? Why wouldn’t I want that?
Well, then, you’re “older people”. (See page 1).
Seren, I am just teasing. 
This whole discussion brings up the question: would you prefer to have to write a thank-you for gifts you receive (assume you have relatives who’ll stop sending stuff if you don’t send a note) or not to get the gift in the first place?
Yeah, I am. 
It is nice to get gifts and very thoughtful. But if the giver is going to stress out over a thank you note, I would rather they saved themselves the bother and did not send me a gift. A phone call or Email should suffice, so many of us do not and will not write and send thank you notes.
The last time I did was 14 years ago for my wedding gifts. Honestly these probably only got done as one of our friends was a printer and printed the thank you cards and I decided I should do so for this one special occasion. If I did not write them and send them, my wife would not have. I think we had them all out within two weeks of the return from our Honeymoon. Since then all of my Thank Yous have been by Phone or Email.
Jim {Apparently an ungrateful ingrate 
}
That’s the way it went down with me and my husband’s niece.
At one point, the way I found out that she received and did actually enjoy a present was when I was visiting them and saw a picture of her wearing the hat I’d sent as a birthday gift.
I finally just quit acknowledging birthdays, but did send a graduation check and no we did not receive a thank you for that. It’s not really the niece’s fault, her mother as well as my husband were not raised to call, email or write thank yous.