Looking Back: The Habit of Saying ‘Thank You’

From February 1975

Why is it so difficult to say “thanks”?

Whether it is the usual bread and butter letter after a visit, or a verbal “Thank you” or a Christmas letter for a present you did not really want…isn’t it difficult to put the proper enthusiasm into your voice, or to make the bald words look as if you meant them? I suppose it is the difficulty of saying the word which has made some people drop it altogether.

Nowadays small courtesies are so neglected in a busy town or city that the need to thank somebody for something has almost disappeared. I, for one, would be so amazed, in a crowded bus or tube, if half of the younger folk jumped up and offered their seats to me that I’d probably forget this politeness. And yet a heart-felt “Thank you!” can turn a gloomy day to sunshine and a gloomy face to smiling.

Perhaps this is the secret…. It has to be heart-felt. A person with thankfulness within them is all the more ready to thank someone else for a favour, however small. And what a great many people there must be in the world who have nothing to be thankful for….. and I’m not thinking of that part of it which is over-populated and always on the starvation level. I’m thinking of us in this crises-fraught island where all the shop windows urge us toward a bigger and better and more luxurious way of life, so that we become, not thankful for our soft living, but more acquisitive.

LITTLE BLESSING

Does an acquisitive society ever stop to count its blessings? In the old days of ‘back court singers’ in Glasgow, there was one couple whose favourite song was ‘Count Your Blessings’. Each year they would appear with another little blessing in the old pram which was wheeled around with them. And no doubt the little blessings which everyone could count softened a few hearts!

Do you remember that chart-topper of a few years ago, ‘Thank you very much for the Aintree Iron’? The leader of the group, on being asked what the Aintree Iron was, said ‘Oh, it doesn’t mean anything…..we just invented it.’ Well, at least they wanted to express some thankfulness for something.

VALUE OF FRIENDS

The Christian Church is the place where the most thankful people should be found. Our chart-topper should be, ‘Thank You for giving me the morning.’ I suppose. Of course it is much easier to feel thankful if one is an optimist. The heroine of South Pacific, when people told her things were bad, and we might as well be dead, sang that she was just ‘a dope with a thing called hope’. Well, where is all our hope and thankfulness? We sing about it so often in church, but come out of it with no word of thankfulness on our lips towards our fellow human being.

What have we to be thankful for? The modern idea of assessing the value of a present received, so that we can give back something of comparable value is, to me, the negation of ‘thank you’, the antithesis of gratitude. This calculated counting of monetary value surely takes all the warmth out of giving and receiving. The affection, the love of our families and friends can never be assessed on a New Pence basis.

THE BEST

One of my young friends recently had the traumatic experience known to so many, of seeing their child going to school for the first time. Always an undemonstrative child, the little girl trotted into the building quite happily without a backward glance. The mother spent a lonely, nail-biting morning until it was time to collect her. She saw her little self-sufficient daughter come out chatting to a friend, then there was a rush of feet, a hand was suddenly thrust in hers and the child exclaimed, “Oh, I do love you, Mummy…. The best ‘Thank You’ a mother could have for all the years of caring…

Calculating your amount of thankfulness is like balancing a pile of coins on a counter, to be knocked down when at the appropriate height, to some good cause. How high would it need to be before it matched all your blessings? Or the gift of the Child in the Manger?

-          By Dorothy Dunbar

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