Thank You

I don’t think we can say “Thank You” enough. Well, we could I suppose, anything can be over used. I guess what I meant to say was that people like to hear “Thank You” from others.

When I was younger, I doubt I said “Thank You” enough, or at all. When I did it was probably because my mom or dad would say “What do you say to your uncle Bill?” What they really meant was “Thank your Uncle Bill you ungrateful little monster or he will think we raised a barbarian!”

“Thank you Uncle Bill.”

Up until a certain point in my life, I believed that if someone gave me a gift, they should just assume I was thankful because I didn’t get that many unsolicited gifts in my life. When I was in my teens, any gifts I got were mostly joke gifts and I figured a long, loud laugh was the best way to say “Thank You”. I was thrown when I would receive a gift from a female friend. They put thought and love into the selection of gifts, which more often than not left me speechless. When I could talk again, thanks just didn’t seem to be enough, but it was all that I had.

Time moves on and I grow into an adult (sort of). When I received gifts from distant relatives, I would make a phone call to thank them for the book, hat. Cassette tape, card and on the rare occasion even money. I would thank them for the gift and then have a nice long chat about how their life and the lives of those they love was going. I would fill them in on the details of my life and that of the family. When the call was over, I felt satisfied that I covered all of the “Thank You” bases.

Inevitably, I would get a call from mom or dad, sister this or brother that and find out that aunt/uncle/sister/brother were quite upset because I didn’t send them a thank you card. A “Thank You” card?  The phone call cost me $15 and 45 minutes of my time, isn’t that “Thank You” enough? Of course by the time I found out what an ungrateful little monster I had been, it was too late to send a card. The next year I would and did send a card, but I know that when the card came whoever it was would look at their significant other, sniff and say “We got a card this year, but that doesn’t make up for last year!”

 

You really just can’t win sometimes.

I am older now and I am the one sending books, hats, gift certificates and birthday cards. Often we will receive thanks in the form of a facebook message, an informative email or a phone call every now and then. It is nice that in this modern era, we can keep in touch with those we love immediately and cheaply via the internet. It is getting more and more expensive to send birthday cards in the mail, or anything else for that matter. Times they do change…

But, would it kill them to send a “Thank You” card?