A complaint, with gratitude

Our culture has a wonderful tradition at marriages in which many well-wishers bring gifts to the wedding reception. These gifts are especially appropriate as they often come from those who are more established in life, and for whom a moderate gift will not represent a significant hardship. Likewise, the recipients of these gifts are generally quite grateful for these gifts, since newlyweds are often working with an extremely small budget and wouldn't otherwise have the means to furnish a home. I'm aware of some young couples who have received gifts from over 250 people. These gifts, while usually only a small sacrifice for any individual giver, represent a great blessing in the life of the recipient.

Our culture also has a tradition that when a gift is received, it is polite to send a card thanking the giver for the gift. Furthermore, many would consider it rude to not send such a card. After all, having received such a gift, could one not do the basic courtesy of acknowledging the gift? Isn't this what the Parable of the Ten Lepers teaches us: that we should seek to thank those who bless us with gifts?

There's a problem here, though. A single young couple having received 250 gifts will now have to write 250 thank-you cards. Generally, these cards are to be hand-written and individually addressed. Writing a personal thank-you card takes time, and is made even more difficult by the fact that the young couple often does not even know the person who gave the gift. (Friends of parents, etc.)

But this time is something that couples often don't have! I'll be honest: I'm busy with homework, organizing a house, taking care of a wife, fixing the car, working, other responsibilities (The Board, for example), etc. I could handle writing one or two gift cards, but while each person who gave us a gift only had to take a short amount of time to select a gift, we have to do all of that times hundreds.

Let's take a look at current trends in computing. These days, most CPUs have multiple cores; they can essentially do two things at once. It's not at all uncommon to have 4 or 8 cores in your home desktop anymore; as a result, programmers have to learn to write programs in parallel. They break a problem down into many sub-problems so that each core can work on it individually. Then all sub-problems are combined into a single problem. This many-to-one pattern works well because the bulk of the work is done in parallel, and in the end there's only a small amount of work to combine the results.

Many-to-one is what we see when all our friends went out and bought us gifts. We genuinely appreciate it, and our lives are much better now because of it.

But on the other hand, one-to-many doesn't work so well. This is seen in computing when one processor tries to solve many problems at once. Have you ever tried to run 30 programs at once on your computer? It doesn't work so well, because the computer gets so bogged down trying to keep track of where everyone's at that it can't get as much of the real work done.

One-to-many is also what we see when a single young couple is asked to send thank-you notes to each person who gave them a gift. Not only do we have to write the notes, we also have to make sure that notes get matched up with envelopes, we have to track down addresses for people we've never heard of, we have to look up what each person gave us, etc. There's a whole lot of overhead that's going on that's separate from the actual expression of thanks.

It's just a huge mess, and really, for not a whole lot. Most people who receive these thank-you cards will briefly read them, smile, realize that the card doesn't really mean a whole lot (since we didn't have time to intensively personalize each one) and throw it away. It just seems like a waste to me. Can't we just let people feel good for having given a gift, without the expectation that every gift will be acknowledged with a hand-written, personalized expression of heartfelt gratitude?

Now, let me be clear. I am grateful for these gifts and the thoughtfulness and generosity behind each one. I am appreciative of the sacrifices that these people made. I'm not trying to say that we somehow deserve all these gifts without any obligation to feel grateful. We are grateful.

But really, would it be so bad to just make a mail-merge somewhat-generic thank-you card and send them all out that way? Or even just an e-mail? I mean, really, if we're just trying to get the message across that we're grateful, why all the other mess. If we'd only received five gifts, I'd happily write cards to express my gratitude. In that case, I could actually take time to write something meaningful. But as we've been writing our thank-you cards, I've found that I usually end up saying the same thing on each one, with little variation. The card isn't meaningful, and it's not because I don't want it to be. I just can't take the time to make each one meaningful; I'm busy trying to keep my head above water. Remember how the young couple is usually not as well established in life? Why then are we putting a huge burden upon them?

So anyway. That's my complaint. I think that the social expectation that every wedding gift must be individually acknowledged with a thank-you card is burdensome and doesn't really do anyone much good.

Well, except for the card-makers and the postal service. I'm sure they love the status quo.

The end.

Feel free to add comments about how ungrateful I am, etc. I'm just frustrated at the daunting task that still remains.