The do’s and don’ts of Christmas thank you letters

My late great-aunt would arrive for Christmas from Edinburgh with a stash of pre-written thank you letters. She’d leave gaps for the specifics of the present and the rest was a scramble of generic, suitably gushing adjectives. The turkey pan would still be soaking and my great-aunt not yet north of the border when you’d be ploughing through her two-sider. My own list of overdue thank you letters – weddings, children’s birthday presents, an impromptu late August BBQ – sit on my to-do list like immovable marker pen, never quite shifted.

Great Aunt Pammie’s clinical efficiency is not something I’ve inherited. But in an age of WhatsApp, there seems to be an absurdity to the paper thank-yous. It’s the impromptu flash of a message the morning after a dinner party glimmering with praise which gives you the smug satisfaction that your slow-cooked ragu was just the ticket, not the dutiful letter which lands through your letterbox after a week of silence. Similarly, the WhatsApped photo of your goddaughter breathless with excitement, fumbling the Polly Pocket you gave her on Christmas morning, is a far greater reward than two lines on a card in January – which has the air of a 1960s school child who’s been made to write lines.

Then there’s the tendency of a letter to relay details to the wedding host which they’re unlikely to have forgotten (‘delicious smoked salmon and rack of lamb, followed by pavlova’). After all, they are the ones who will have shelled out for 150 rounds of it. Or the dangerously dull straying into an inventory of proceedings (‘fantastic brass band, speeches and dancing’).

Writing in the American magazine the Ladies’ Home Journal in February 1894, Mrs Lyman relayed: ‘The “bread and butter” letter as it is sometimes called, because it is supposed to be a letter of thanks for what bread and butter stands for, should be written within 24 hours after arrival at one’s destination, to the hostess whose hospitality one has been enjoying.’