Cheering Friendship, a Festival Thank-you Letters

Posted by dodo

Not a Beecher’s Brook at Christmas but definitely a rather hairy water-jump. Try and get thank-you letters written on Boxing Day or a dreadful paralysis sets in, and you get sliding- eyed teenagers home for half-term in February saying defensively, ‘Well I definitely wrote, but your writing in the telephone book’s so lousy that I may have read the address wrong.’

The upper classes, who are very hot on good manners, make even four-year-olds write letters: ‘Thank you for my luvly prezent’, plus a picture of a Christmas tree. To avoid tantrums in the nursery, this has usually been written by the nanny with her left hand.

If you chivvy older children too much, they get bolshy and won’t even get halfway down the page by Twelfth Night. This is shaming when all one’s much younger nephews and nieces write witty and charming letters that get three- quarters down a second page, and arrive on 28 December.

My husband’s godson, who is at prep school, went to the other extreme and wrote all his letters before the end of the Christmas term. His parents were astounded, until he showed them the letters, which all had carefully spaced blanks to be filled in on Boxing Day.

I had great difficulty this year stopping my son from running his letters off on the word processor, thundering to him that ‘Thank you for your lovely present’ is not specific enough. Nor is it enough just to have thanked Granny when she rang up on Christmas Day.

There was one dreadful year when I discovered that I’d made my shopping list on the back of the children’s thank- you letters, which were still waiting on the kitchen shelf for me to provide envelopes and addresses. And another, when I primed my daughter, then ten, to put in a sentence to all female relations, saying that she hoped Christmas hadn’t exhausted them too much. My daughter dutifully sat down at the kitchen table, and in the middle of the first letter asked my cockney char how to spell the word ‘weren’t', in the sentence, ‘I hope you weren’t too tired.’

`No such word,’ said the char firmly, ‘It’s “wasn’t” too tired.’

So my daughter `wasn’t-ed’ all her letters, and later had to rewrite the whole lot.

Beware of protesting too much. If you rave on and on and on about the orange muffler knitted you by Rich Great Aunt Phyllis, you will get an orange jersey next year, orange mittens the year after that, and probably nothing but orange sheep left you in her will.

Beware, too, of truth. Some years ago, when it first became fashionable in London, I gave a vat of seeded mustard to my father-in-law for Christmas. Being a perfect gentleman, he wrote me a sweet letter saying how delighted he was, and how the mustard would enhance every meal. Next day I got a letter from my brother-in-law, who’d been staying with my father-in-law over Christmas, saying, ‘Thank you for the Stilton — actually I hate the stuff, so I swapped it for Dad’s mustard, because he can’t stand that either.’

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