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Let’s Be Done With Thank-You Notes
Give yourself a break from the formal apparatus of giving and receiving thanks this year
By Erin White, WSJ
Nov. 23, 2023
WSJ’s Life & Work team presents a holiday-season series about one secret to happiness: lower expectations of yourself and others. Up next is the thank-you note.
It’s time to send the handwritten thank-you note the way of the horse and buggy.
For most of us, the thank-you note is an onerous chore on an already spiraling to-do list, wedged somewhere between writing your boss a new draft of that memo, locating the crumpled permission slip at the bottom of your son’s backpack and finally rescheduling your doctor’s appointment.
Writing a thank-you note requires keeping track of who needs thanking, crafting a message that strikes the right tone, thoughtful but succinct, neither florid nor terse. To say nothing of hunting down a mailing address, buying the cards and getting the stamps.
The obligations stack up particularly high at certain life stages: 20 notes to all the kiddies who attended Ethan’s fourth birthday, holiday gifts, newborn presents.
Even Lizzie Post, etiquette maven and great-great-granddaughter of manners arbiter Emily Post, thinks that while a handwritten note can convey special effort, a texted thank you is OK in most situations. Especially within groups of friends or peers, the thank-you text has become standard and accepted, she says.
Emily Post herself venerated the in-person thank you as the highest form of expressing gratitude, even more so than the handwritten note, she says.
“The biggest thing is to actually say the thank you one way or another,” Post says.
Who’s writing?
One of the worst things about thank-you notes? The chore overwhelmingly falls to women.
In heterosexual couples, women haul the gratitude load while doing most of the housework and caregiving duties. In marriages where each spouse earns about the same amount of money, wives spend about 2.5 more hours a week doing housework than husbands do, and roughly two hours more on caregiving, a Pew Research study this year found.
Women purchase more than 80% of all greeting cards, which includes thank-you cards, according to the Greeting Card Association, a trade group.
Gender roles around thanking people “is a particular practice that I feel has really not shifted,” says Emily West, a communication professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, who has researched greeting and thank-you cards.
Of course, some people enjoy writing thank-you notes. If you’re one of them, keep on writing.
And even for those of us who dislike writing notes, expressing gratitude in some way is still important. If someone does something nice for you or buys you a gift, let them know you appreciate it.
The question is: How to do it, and who should do it?
One easy first step is to give yourself and others a break from the formal apparatus of giving and receiving thanks. A simple texted thanks is great. So is a quick video of your nephew enjoying his new toy. Telling a friend in person how much you appreciate the cozy scarf is always wonderful.
After a party, people sometimes send a mass thank you via the invitation message service—“Thank you all for coming and for the lovely gifts!”—and that’s A-OK. Also fine: You hand someone a gift, they say thanks, and that’s it.
“It is hard. It is time-consuming,” says Eve Rodsky about writing thank-you cards.
Is it time to do away with thank-you notes? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.
Rodsky, a mother of three, became so fed up with handling too many of the household chores that she invented a system of task cards that couples can use to divide duties, and wrote a book about it called “Fair Play.” The responsibility for thanking people is a task card she nearly always recommends for men in heterosexual couples, she says.
Most couples she works with together decide that they value expressing gratitude but that it doesn’t need to happen in the form of a handwritten note. More often, thanking people means simply that the recipient will make some contact with the giver to express appreciation. A video, a text, a Paperless Post message are all OK.
“A thank-you note does not have to look like stationery and a stamp anymore,” she says.
Write to Erin White at erin.white@wsj.com
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