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I suddenly remembered the curse of thank you letters today. As fun as Christmas and birthdays were, they had a spectre hanging over them which was the necessity to write to all your stupid relatives who’d sent you book tokens or whatever and tell them how grateful you were and what you’d been up to. Do people still do this in the digital age? We tend to film our kids shouting thank you and send that via WhatsApp or whatever, which is a whole lot easier.
But back in the 70s and 80s our parents had to cajole and hassle and force us to put pen to paper. And even though the letters generally took minutes to complete and you could just basically say the same thing to everyone we dragged out the process for weeks and maybe even months. I don’t know why. We spent more time refusing to write letters than it would have taken to write letters. It seemed to be a huge injustice that people expected something in return for their gifts. To be fair I can still see both sides of this argument. Sure, you should be grateful for gifts, but gifts should also not come with conditions. Even if the conditions are not as arduous as you seem to be making them out to be.
My daughter currently has such joy in writing it seems unlikely that she wouldn’t want to do it - she sent my parents a Christmas card with a note saying “When can I come and play your peeanno?” Which is a charming summation of 2020 and how weird this must have been for kids. Sure it’s not, when can I come and see you, but she associates my parents with their piano and it’s rather sweet that that is what is occupying her thoughts. Hopefully it won’t be long, but it’s sad that the potential memories that this year might have created have been sucked out of all of our brains by the immoral doctor that is this horrible year.
Anyway writing letters at all seems unbearably quaint nowadays. Will anyone have boxes full of their teenage love emails or messenger messages (or whatever the kids are using these days)?
Letters were fun. I still can’t work out what my problem with thank you letters was or indeed what their problem with not getting one was. But well done to my parents for not letting it go and making sure I did them. Nearly everyone I sent them to is dead now though, so what was the point? I guess that’s true of everything.
If you’re interested in more thoughts on Taskmaster, I answered a lot of questions about it
on Reddit today
Also available in audio wherever you get your podcasts
