Dear Miss Manners – What would be a correct way to prompt my husband’s married children to write thank-you letters or notes for gifts?
I have tried to convince my husband to stop sending them gifts altogether so they will get the message. He refuses.
Is it proper etiquette to stop sending the gifts and to write them and let them know what is happening?
Gentle Reader – Are you asking if it is polite to send out written punishments for Christmas? Well, no. And that goes double for stepparents.
But here’s how to do it: You send them Christmas greetings with your fondest love and a lot of warm family chitchat. Only at the end of the letter do you say you haven’t sent the usual presents because you gather from their silence that previous attempts to find something to please them have not been a success.
Miss Manners insists that only your husband can authorize such a letter, as they are his children. It would be best sent by him, but you could write the letter if you make it clear that it is on his behalf, not your own.
If he won’t, you may make a Christmas call in which you humbly ask if the presents were all right, thus eliciting some kind of thanks. Your object, after all, is to salvage his feelings rather than to rough up theirs.
Dear Miss Manners – I invited a family I have known for 20 years for oyster stew on Christmas Eve. The answer came back that the father of the family didn’t like oyster stew.
I offered to prepare something else for him. A few days later, the mother told me they had been invited to another family’s house for supper and had accepted. In my book, this is incredibly rude. This notion goes back to high-school proms in the ’50s, when you either accepted the invitation of the first youth who asked you or turned down subsequent invitations.
Gentle Reader – Miss Manners feels obliged to tell you that the prom rule was not as strict as you remember. Rather, you were allowed to turn down any number of youths until the right one came along, provided you did so graciously and without a false excuse.
Thus, it was all right to say “Thank you so much, but I’m afraid I can’t, but not “I hate proms,” much less “Not if you were the last boy on Earth.” As the vague version could be interpreted as already having a date, one was free to accept another offer.
Your friends violated both parts of this rule. Miss Manners congratulates you on not having to spend Christmas Eve with such ungracious people.
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Send your questions to Miss Manners, in care of the Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611.
