Here’s my thank-you note story. I attended a birthday party a few weeks ago for a couple’s 1 year old daughter.
As we were eating the cake, I was sitting next to the mother. I asked her if she planned on opening up the gifts so we could all see what she had gotten (gifts for a 1 year old are always SO cute!!) She looked at the table full of gifts and sighed, “Oh, I told everyone not to bring gifts!” I replied, “You have to let her get gifts! What’s a birthday party without gifts?!” And she said, “Well, I didn’t want her to get gifts because I didn’t want to have to write thank you cards.”
I was speechless. Actually, not. I said, “Well, I absolve you from writing us a card if it means she can keep her gift.” I was always under the impression that you wrote thank you cards because you appreciate the gift (or at least the thought involved), not due to any obligation.
PublicBlast, it’s not the use of a gift registry that is rude, but the act of proclaiming it to people who haven’t asked. It’s insulting on two levels - first, because you’re essentially asking for gifts, and second, because you’re telling people that you don’t trust their taste, so you’re going to tell them what to buy for you. If someone doesn’t know what to get, or wants to consult you, the registry is a good way for you not to have to remember on the spot all the things that you might suggest, and whether you’ve suggested them to someone else already. It also helps if they don’t want to ask you directly, but instead ask your mother what you want. Who knows what she’d suggest if she didn’t have the registry to fall back on!
We made a point of registering for both low-end and high-end stuff. The secretaries and paralegals in my office got us mixing bowls, and one of my father’s friends from college got us the expensive German knives. I use them both all the time and love having both. I also got plenty of crystal vases, but they class up my otherwise low-budget furnishings. I estimate that fewer than half of our guests got something from the registry list, and we got wonderful and unique gifts that I adore and would never have thought to ask for.
And yes, we sent thank-you notes for each and every item. It took about six months - we only had around 80 or so people at the wedding, but we had invited something like 250, and many of them sent gifts. My only peeve was that more than half the guests brought gifts to the reception instead of sending them. This always requires getting someone to pack them up and deal with them while the bride and groom are setting off on their honeymoon, but it was more annoying in my case because we were married on the west coast and we live on the east coast. It took something like eight months for my mom to box up everything securely and send it to us, so we were sending out thank-you notes for gifts that we didn’t even have possession of yet. (We opened all of them after the honeymoon and before flying back east).
It’s not a “group thank you” to anyone but you. That’s the point. Each person (or couple), individually and all on their own, picked out a gift for you.
With respect – That’s you. A lot of people think much less of people who are happy to accept gifts but can’t be bothered to acknowledge them.
I’d guess I’m ten years or so older than you – so not exactly over the hill – and I am irked by people who don’t bother to send thank-yous. It’s not an issue worth cutting someone dead over, but it certainly makes me less likely to send any more gifts.
The bottom line IMO is that you need to start thinking about it not from your perspective – I don’t want to write letters; I didn’t like the gift anyway; I wouldn’t care if I were thanked or not – but from theirs. The problem with your position is that it is at bottom a selfish one – what do I want to do, what’s easiest for me – and “selfish” is often (though not always) a good indicator of “rude.”
My fiancee and I had an engagement party in February. 200 people and lots of cash and nice gifts for us. I admit that I think that Thank You notes are stupid and a waste of time. But I still insisted that we write the Thank You notes anyway, realizing that they’re important to some people.
So my fiancee wrote 95 of them in the course of 3 days. (She doesn’t have a job so she agreed. I was more than willing to chip in). We mailed out most of them to our friends. But I didn’t have the addresses for some of my parents’ friends and relatives. So I gave them to my mother to address. My mother proceeded to pick and choose which ones to address. The rest she dumped in the garbage. I asked her why she did this. She stated that many people (especially close family friends and relatives) would be very offended upon receiving a Thank You card.
You see, in our culture “thank you” is implied. And you simply don’t say “thank you” to someone who is that close to you. By saying it, you’re basically distancing yourself from that person.
Example: My dad’s very close friend gave us $250. If I gave him a Thank You card, he would ask himself: “Why is JJ thanking me? I’m almost like a father to him. Of course I know he’s grateful for anything I give him. By thanking me, he’s implying that I might not be sure of how grateful he is. Does he not feel as close to me as I do to him?”
Incidentally, I recently learned that the phrases “Thank you”, “Excuse me”, and “I’m sorry” don’t even exist in the language of my culture. These things are always implied. And I’m starting to feel that the culture is much more positive that way. You should always assume the best intentions of the other person. You only need to voice something if the negative is true: If you’re not sorry or if you’re not thankful.
So you brought me chicken when I ordered beef? I know that you’re sorry already. So I lent you $20 for gas? I know that you’re thankful already.
We each wrote the notes to whoever showed up from “our” side of the aisle, then swapped the finished notes and added our own signatures to the other’s notes. (I forget who had the longer guest list, but we simply divided those and wrote addresses until we were done, without regard to whose guest they were. Whoever wrote faster got stuck writing more addresses, but we were young and in love, so it didn’t matter.) We had just over 500 invitees (that translated to 112 thank-yous–we invited the kids).
Cash donors were thanked for the exact dollar amount (so they knew we got it) with a note thanking them for keeping our honeymoon off the credit cards. Check donors were also thanked for the amount, with a note thanking them for the bicycles we spent the collected checks on.
That was one aspect that hasn’t been mentioned regarding the thank yous–a thank you lets the donor know that their gift didn’t enrich the life of some greedy guest (or univited guest).
Um, we’re Gujarati too. I’d have been in deep shit with my mother and ALL the other mothers in the area had I not sent out thank-you notes promptly after receiving graduation gifts. These same Gujarati moms are the ones who are grumpy about not getting thank-you notes from the aforementioned wedding.
I’ll agree that there’s no specific phrase for “thank you,” though. Maybe the families are just more Americanized? We are in the Midwest, after all.
Current has nice cards.
You should also check out area print shops.
Sometimes it is cheaper to have some made.
There are also paper stores - they sell the blanks to print shops. They usually sell to the public. I picked up a box of 500 blank ecru colored cards made out of cotton paper (with envelopes) for about 15 bucks.
They didn’t say thank you, but they were very elegant just the same.
You could easily customize them with rubber stamps if you’d like. I like them blank so I can use them for stuff other than Thank You notes.
I just had to chime in again on the TY note issue.
I teach school, Kindergarten to be exact. I have 18 kids in my class.
I get gifts from my students throughout the school year, on Christmas (almost all the kids give me a gift), Valentine’s Day (about half the kids give me a gift), Teacher Appreciation Week (maybe a handful of kids give me a gift) and at the end of the year (usually all the kids give me a gift).
That’s lotsa TY notes. And each child gets a handwritten TY note. I wouldn’t dream of NOT sending TY notes.
(and there’s only so many ways you can say “Thank you for the ‘#1 Teacher’ mug” ! But I do personalize each note in other ways.)
And I thought this was only my weird collecting habit: books on etiquette, “domestic science”, “how to be a good little wife” stuff. (For me - a single, frozen food eater, who’s house rates a “quite” on the untidy house poll but who still tries to have good manners - the irony just makes me laugh.) Perhaps we could compare notes or trade in duplicates? Feel free to e-mail if interested, Scarlett.
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For someone who just said she tries to have good manners, I confess I’m not so good with the thank-you notes. But then, I’ve never had a shower or wedding in my honor, and birthday/christmas gifts are always only from close relatives (the whole “we know” thing, so it’s not expected), so I feel I’m off the hook. At least that’s what I tell myself. Does it help that I still feel guilty for not sending thank-yous for my college graduation gifts? Would sending them now, more than a dozen years later, help?
And add me to the list of those befuddled (to put it politely) by those (majority of people) who don’t RSVP. I’ve even tried the “regrets only” route, but the response was no better.
Regarding the OP, yes, I think it’s tacky to ask guests to address their own thank-you notes. Personally, I hope someday to have a reason to write 100 or so such notes (no, not for the gifts, but for the typical reason/event behind them).
Cessandra–I favor museum gift shops and Papyrus stores for notecards and thank you notes. I have a great “Tiffany Windows” set that I’m working through now.
I was writing thank yous for college graduation checks this evening, and I found that the perfect time for writing thank you notes is while threads load on the SDMB. In the time it takes for a thread to pop up and load entirely, you can dash off the standard two-paragraph, adjective-stuffed thank you card*.
Not that I’m not truely thankful for the gifts–those checks will really help as I set up living on my own. But it can feel like a bit of a chore to express those thanks in prim notecards addressed to distant relatives. I’d like to just thank them in a phone call, but some people require things in writing.
I don’t know if I can explain the logic, but I’ll try. When my wife and I got married (I don’t remember if these were a wedding or shower gift to be honest), we this huge set of serving pans* from a few of my parents friends. We never registered for them, didn’t want them, and they sat, boxed in our basement for 3 years. We knew they were nice, and of excellent quality, but we laughed at the pans, we didn’t use them at all, they just sat there. Then, we began to have family gatherings at our place. Damn, did those pans come in handy. We certainly wouldn’t have bought them, even though we have the money now, we still don’t buy stuffl like that, just for entertaining. But we use them now, at big get togethers, and appreciate the gifts much more as time goes on.
*I’m not sure if thats the real name for these kind of pans, they are the kind you can cook in, serve in, and store stuff in, and they look all sorts of fancy.
Well, as I said, my mother picked out a few very close relatives and friends to NOT send the cards to. But of the 95, she only removed like 6 or 7 of them. So most people are Americanized enough to send cards to. But think about India. There, you probably won’t ever see a Thank You card as long as you live. Then again, with cable TV and internet, Americanization might even be more rampant over there. But I’m srarting to think that the implied “Thank You” is really a positive view on humanity in general. Or maybe its just my laziness talking.
Not that I know of. I’ve never actually heard anyone say “thank you” in anything but English, and heard no equivalent when we would visit family back in India.
Whoops, JJ sneaked in there while I was posting. I agree that you won’t see it in India. And I’ll admit that I didn’t think of sending family in India a thank-you note. Then again, they didn’t send me anything.
Oh, I only have six or seven of them. I’m not a mad collector, but if I happen to come across one, I snag it. It’s all Mr. S’s fault – he basically inherited all the books that had been in his parents’ house, and one was an Amy Vanderbilt from 1952. The chapter titled “Gracious Living Without Servants” just tickled me to death. The prize in my collection is an autographed Emily Post from 1937, which my my bookseller friend gave me as a gift. I’m also a Miss Manners fan. She’s so snarky! I loved her advice to someone who wanted to know the etiquette of picking one’s nose. :eek: Her reply was something along the lines of that she couldn’t advise, as etiquette concerns itself only with public behavior.
Interesting about the Gujarati thing. I think the Amish have a similar tradition.
I estimate that fewer than half of our guests got something from the registry list, and we got wonderful and unique gifts that I adore and would never have thought to ask for.
