On Thank You Notes as an Occasion of Sin

Again with Those Two Wolves

It’s June, and wedding season is upon us—which means that thank you note season is upon us as well. I am highly conscientious by nature and ALWAYS send thank you notes within mere hours of receiving a gift or attending an event. When I was in my early twenties, one such thank you note prompted its recipient, an older British lady, to marvel, “You’re so well-bred!” Until a few years ago, I would meticulously hand-write my notes on pretty cards and send them off the old-timey way, through the postal service, with stamps and everything. (In some situations I still do this.) After our wedding, my husband and I churned out all our thank you notes (well over a hundred) before a week had passed. So I hope my readers will acknowledge that it is not laziness or ingratitude that makes me say the following: I believe that thank you note etiquette is an occasion of sin and ought to be abolished.

Are you surprised? Please know that I am not opposed to thank you notes because I dislike thanking people. In fact, I think gratitude is crucial to our mental health. A guaranteed way to improve our mood is to think about the ways we’re lucky, the people who have helped us, the many blessings in our lives. If you are feeling down, allow me to recommend that you send a quick text or email to someone in your past, thanking them for giving you advice, offering you help, making you laugh, or sharing a kindness. You could even stop reading this essay and do it right now. Go ahead—I’ll be right here when you get back.

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Aren’t you glad you connected with that teacher, old friend, mentor, or neighbor?

While a common criticism of thank you notes is that they are insincere, that is not why I oppose them either—although in fact they often are insincere. (For example, this article makes the convincing point that thank you notes are merely a “genteel signifier” rather than a true expression of grateful feeling or of emotional connection.)

This amusing example of an insincere thank you note comes from Diary of a Wimpy Kid, by Jeff Kinney.

For the record, I have no problem with insincerity in the service of kindness or social harmony. After all, the correct answer to the question “Does this dress make me look fat?” is “No! You look perfect!” Or, if you feel you absolutely must convey the information that you don’t like the dress, you can channel your inner Minnesotan and say “I think I like the other dress a little bit better.” (Just don’t be like Al Bundy and say “It’s the fat that makes you look fat”!) Thank you notes aren’t an occasion of sin because they’re insincere, but rather because they divide us from each other and make us feel grumpy and hard-done-by.

Thank You Note Stories

To illustrate what I mean, let me share a couple of personal stories as well as some screenshots I’ve been collecting of online conversations about thank you notes. My first objection to thank you note etiquette is that thank you notes introduce distance and hierarchy into relationships that could be closer and more equal. Shortly before getting married, I moved to my future husband’s city, and I needed a job. My dear friend Susan threw me a networking bridal shower. Instead of bringing gifts of kitchen items, the guests brought their business cards and offered to give me informational interviews. Susan was a fantastic cook, and she catered the party herself. She put a huge amount of effort and creativity into this lovely (and helpful!) party, and I thanked her profusely afterwards. That same day, I wrote her a thank you note and mailed it off. When it arrived, she called me and said, “I thought we were better friends than this! You don’t ever have to write me a thank you note!” Isn’t that an interesting perspective? I think Susan was correct: Thank you notes are indeed “genteel signifiers” that are unnecessary for people in close relationships, who can express their gratitude face-to-face. I think of handwritten thank you notes as analogous to the formal “you” found in most other languages—Sie or vous instead of du or tu, for example.

A perennial feature of etiquette and advice columns is letters from put-out people complaining that their young relatives don’t send them thank you notes. Often these older relatives will announce that they are no longer giving their young relatives gifts in retaliation for this neglect of thank you note duty. I always find these letters to be so sad. While I have written before that I think it is perfectly fine not to give gifts—most of us don’t need more stuff!—withdrawing gifts to punish kids for failing to observe antiquated etiquette rules is neither kind nor effective in achieving our goal of making kids more grateful and considerate. These complaining older relatives are expecting a level of formality and an adherence to protocol that doesn’t fit with loving relationships, in my opinion.

The business setting demonstrates that thank you notes reinforce hierarchy too. Take a look at this recent online dispute:

I think Mr. Sullivan is behind the times in his irritation at job candidates who don’t write thank you notes to interviewers. Especially in these days of near-full employment, when businesses are struggling to find good workers, perhaps the company ought be writing the notes to the candidates—or they should at least not expect an act of obeisance from every interviewee.

The rule about handwritten thank you notes also reinforces negative, judgmental feelings and encourages us to feel put-upon rather than loving toward one another. This expectation closes us off to other, more spontaneous, ways of expressing our gratitude. A friend of my husband’s family gave us a pretty crystal prism as a wedding gift. We sent a traditional handwritten note immediately. A few years later, when our son was a baby, we noticed that he was fascinated by the rainbows that the prism cast, and my husband emailed the friend to thank him again and to say how nice it was that another generation was enjoying his gift. The friend, clearly having forgotten about our note, responded by asking my husband why he was three years late with his thank you note.

The letter below is an especially sad example of how thank you note etiquette reinforces bad feelings:

From the New York Times Social Qs column, by Philip Galanes.

Imagine reacting to the loss of a friend by being upset that the family hasn’t thanked you promptly enough—and then airing that grievance in public. And imagine feeling compelled to write a bunch of thank you notes when you’re in mourning for your parents. Incidentally, there were several hundred comments on this letter by readers who were, in their turn, outraged by the letter-writer, which only perpetuated and propagated the negativity.

Or consider this advice, which I found on an online etiquette page:

Note the passive-aggressive tone of “hardly anyone seems to remember to do it these days.” Never mind. I’ll just sit here in the dark. But also, do the recipients of these notes really save them? They don’t just glance over them, think “Oh, nice,” check off a mental box that a social expectation has been met, and then chuck the notes in the recycling? Additionally, as someone whose handwriting is truly illegible, I find it hard to believe that our handwriting is meaningful to our loved ones. I mean, my handwriting is not meaningful in a quite literal sense, given that the only way you can extract any meaning from it is if I read it out loud to you.

This is part of an essay I wrote for my German class. Yes, I needed to read it aloud in class because no one else could decipher it.

These fabled folks who save and treasure thank you notes aside, the grumpiness about thank you notes is universal. Kids hate writing them—since the invention of writing, has any child ever willingly sat down to write a thank you note without being cajoled, pestered, bribed, or threatened? Joan Crawford’s daughter even (albeit hyperbolically) claimed in Mommie Dearest that having to write thank you notes was a form of child abuse. Even for adults, writing thank you notes is almost always an onerous chore. And it may not have escaped readers that I, in turn, am holding enough of a grudge about being falsely accused of neglecting my thank you note obligation for the prism that I’m still talking about it two decades later.

Occasions of Sin and Those Wolves

An occasion of sin is any circumstance that tempts us flawed humans away from the good and toward evil. In the famous Cherokee story, two wolves do battle in our souls—a good wolf and an evil wolf—and the one that wins is the one we feed. I believe that the etiquette around handwritten thank you notes is an occasion of sin because it encourages us to feed the bad wolf. The rule that there is only one correct way to express gratitude—a way that moreover feels archaic to anyone under forty—can make recipients of gifts feel beleagured instead of grateful. And when the recipients neglect to hand-write and mail physical thank you notes, the gift-givers feel licensed to nurse, ruminate over, and air in public their indignation toward people for whom they should have loving feelings. Wouldn’t we be better off if we treated each other with warmth and caring instead, like the wolves in this photo?

I love wolves and prefer not to slander them by inserting a photo of them fighting, which they don’t typically do anyway. So enjoy this photo of these affectionate, beautiful creatures. Photo by Yannick Menard on Unsplash.

There Is Another Way

If I had my druthers, here’s what we would do to remove the bad feelings from thank you note etiquette and restore the warm friendliness of true gratitude:

1. First, let’s divorce gift-giving from note-writing—we are perfectly free to either give a gift or not, but when we let go of the attitude that giving a gift entitles us to a handwritten note, we will be much happier. Yes, I think this should apply even for formal events like weddings, baby showers, and bar mitzvahs.

2. Next, we should declare that handwritten thank you notes belong in the same category as homemade jam, hand-knit socks, and other old-fashioned crafts. Some people have beautiful handwriting or can do calligraphy or like to create handmade cards. Those people may enjoy crafting handwritten thank you cards as a special gesture from the heart—but such notes ought not to be obligatory for the rest of us less-artistic types.

3. Finally, we should broaden our idea of how to thank people. Technology gives us many easy ways to show our gratitude (and realistically, the easier it is to do the right thing, the more likely people are to do it). We can thank each other in person, by text, by email, or—for the extroverts out there who still enjoy calling people—on the phone.

Here’s an example of the kind of thank you that is common in my circle. Because thanking people by text message is easy, we ladies thank each other for everything. Immediately after a gift, dinner, party, or even a nice gesture (I recently thanked a friend for taking me to a cheese shop in her neighborhood), we send each other messages like these. The more thanking the better, I say!

A recent WhatsApp group chat (with last names redacted) after my neighbor hosted a potluck dinner party.

Or there’s always this idea, which Janet Lansbury, a parenting expert, expressed in an interview with Ezra Klein:

[Children are] adept at open-hearted, genuine communication that often doesn’t have words attached to it yet. . . . And so often we miss [that] children are actually saying it much more beautifully and genuinely without the words than a child who says, thank you, Mrs. Lansbury.

For instance, this look on my son’s face, after my parents gave him a robot:

Doesn’t this beat the heck out of a card? (My son gave me permission to use this photo because he is, in his words, “happy to contribute to thank you note slander.”)

Gratitude is a source of joy and abundance, and we express it in myriad ways. A handwritten thank you note that is sent through the mail is only one of these. This is actually a much larger point: The people in our lives might show their love for us in unconventional ways, through actions rather than words, or through unromantic gifts like a Kevlar glove because your husband has noticed that while chopping vegetables you also tend to chop your finger. (Yes, this is a personal example.) If we open ourselves to expressions of love and gratitude around us, however, wherever, and whenever they occur, we will be much happier, and our relationships will be richer and more rewarding.

What do you think, readers? Are you team handwritten thank you cards sent through the mail? Or no? And did you interrupt your reading of this essay so you could text or email someone to thank them? What happened? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

The great thing about this joke is that it’s a shaggy dog story—a long-winded joke that can be expanded to absurd lengths and that culminates in a somewhat underwhelming punchline. Famous shaggy dog stories include Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant” and the film The Aristocrats, about the eponymous joke. The version of the joke below is relatively concise, but feel free to elaborate it with superfluous details when you tell it to your friends.

So a man has been invited to dinner at his aunt’s house. He asks her for directions, and she says,

“First, you get out at the 79th Street subway station, and you should push the turnstile with your right hip to get out. Then walk one block to Amsterdam Avenue. My building is on the corner, above the Chinese restaurant. Using your right elbow, buzz my buzzer, and I’ll buzz you in. Using your left hip, nudge the door open. The elevator is across the lobby. Using your left elbow, press the button. When the elevator arrives, press the 5 button with your right elbow. The elevator will take you to just outside my apartment, so when you get there, bump the door with your elbow to let me know you’re outside.”

The man is totally confused by now. “OK, so that tells me how to get to your apartment, but what’s all this mishegas about hips and elbows? Why can’t I touch anything?

“What?!” his aunt asks, shocked. “You’re coming empty-handed?”