It is doubly sad to report on the death of the thank you letter while painfully aware that you yourself have speeded its demise, writes Ann Marie Hourihane.
The thank you letter is really gone now, extinct among the under-65s. There are small pockets of resistance, consisting chiefly of young children whose mothers make their own jam, which shows exactly how small those pockets of resistance actually are.
But most of us are resigned to the fact that the thank you letter has gone the way of the Latin Mass and afternoon tea, a lovely but obsolete event, kept alive by a tiny group of ageing practitioners.
Only politicians and banks send them these days, making thank you letters almost suspicious. Old people mutter darkly "That girl will go far", as they reel from the shock of a thank you letter from someone under-50.
Polite people nowadays text or phone. We gave a party recently and all our replies came by text, as did most of the thanks. We were delighted with them, thanks very much.
My thank yous for the gifts people brought have been hampered by the fact that so few of them were labelled - another sign that all hopes for the thank you letter are gone.
I've already phoned two people to thank them for gifts they did not give. But of course, just as soon as I've found out who the other generous people are, I'm definitely going to write . . .
In defence of all those of us who never - or hardly ever - write thank you letters, two social trends can be cited.
First of all, for the younger generation it has to be said that presents of all types have multiplied at a heart-stopping rate.
It's hard to get an 11-year-old to sit down and write a thank you letter for a gift when her mother/auntie/granny brings the child a gift every time they go shopping; just as it is hard to persuade a mother/auntie/granny to resist all those adorable, cheap clothes for 11-year-olds.
Kids now regard present-giving as part of an adult's job. It's all you can do to get them to place a thank you phone call.
And this brings us to the second social trend that has killed the thank you letter - the explosion in communication. Is it really all right to text your thanks? Do e-mails count? Have you left it too late to cover your thank you with a phone call? Sometimes sheer ambition (or pretension) kills any thank you stone dead.
Instead of writing a boring old thank you letter you'll get a copy of that book you were talking about at dinner, wrap it in swansdown, and have it delivered with a witty note on that really good notepaper you've been planning to buy. Result: no thank you message of any kind, festering guilt and another step towards the abyss . . . or so I'm told.
There are reports of heroic and strategically brilliant counter-attacks on the part of the thank you letter's supporters. There was the man in Britain, for example, a godfather to numerous young people, who wrote to the papers - in what should probably be termed a please letter than a thank you letter - to say that he had spent many fruitless Christmases waiting by his letter box, expecting some written words of gratitude from his godchildren in response to his generous gifts. Of course he was disappointed. So he decided to sit down and do some writing himself.
He informed his godchildren that their Christmas gifts from him would now be the result of a letter writing competition, with a fat cheque going to the most witty, informative and lively letter received at the beginning of the Christmas period. In other words he got his miserable, modern godchildren to write please letters instead.
The thank you letter used to be one of the linchpins of civilised life, an iron rule of childhood. The Mitford girls called a thank you letter a "Collins", after the oleaginous clergyman in Pride and Prejudice. Sincerity was never a hallmark of the thank you letter. "Dear Granny, thanks so much for the fantastic gift. Beige is such a useful colour . . ." and so on. But the letters had to be written nevertheless, by adults as well as children.
I once went out with a man who came out with this sentence in late December: "Oh no! Auntie Penny sent me stain remover for Christmas and I never wrote to thank her!"
It was the death knell of our relationship. No marriage could be that mixed.
I thought of the gifts my aunties had so sweetly given me, and which at that moment were strewn all over my bedroom floor, and I knew it was never going to work. My civilised friend emigrated to England, where formality had not yet become a dirty word.
It is a strange society which supports something as complicated as Santa Claus, but abandons the simple thank you letter. Perhaps it might revive now that we are entering leaner times; although those of us with a shameful record on the matter doubt it.