It's considered common courtesy to thank people who give you things, and in most cultures, if you weren't able to thank them in person and/or if the gift was part of a special occasion, it's polite to thank them via a letter. However, not everyone likes this, and this trope is about the ones who don't. Usually these individuals are kids, although some might be teens or even adults. Adults having this problem are often guys, due to the stereotype that Men Are Uncultured.
Their reasons for not wanting to write a thank you letter can vary. Maybe they didn't like the gift or they don't like the person who gave them the gift very much, or they just don't know the gift-giver very well. Maybe there's nothing wrong with the gift itself and they're on good terms with the giver, but they're lazy or they have something else they'd rather do or they're just a bit unsure because they don't know how to write a letter or don't know how to express their thankfulness.
They might try to save time by having a very short message (for example, just "thank you" and nothing else) or blatantly admitting that they dislike the gift if that's what's the problem, or (if they have to write a bunch of them) writing a bunch of near-identical letters and filling in the blanks. These letters might then be read by someone else (usually a parent or teacher) who will insist the letter-writer try again.
This is becoming less of a problem with the advent of the Internet but still lingers on sometimes.
May lead to An Aesop about thankfulness and/or manners. Sometimes overlaps with Unwanted Gift Plot and Homemade Sweater from Hell. Sometimes Truth in Television. May be part of a Christmas Episode or Birthday Episode. Compare with Grudging "Thank You".
Examples
- Calvin and Hobbes: One strip shows Calvin writing a thank you letter to his grandmother after Christmas. He claims he does it right after getting a gift from her, ever since she sent an empty box with a sarcastic message that said she was just checking to see if the mail service was still working.
- In Peanuts, Sally once waited six weeks to write a thank you letter to her grandmother.
- Adrian Mole: When Adrian receives a birthday present of a toothbrush holder made by a prisoner Grace Pool, his aunt tells him to write and thank her. He writes an extremely short letter and is not happy about having to do so.
She wants me to start writing to prisoners! Grace Pool could be a murderess or anything!
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid: In one book, Greg needs to write his Christmas thank you letters but is in a hurry because he has a project he wants to do, so he just writes a bunch of near-identical letters with the format "Dear A, Thank you so much for the awesome B! How did you know I wanted that for Christmas? I love the way the B looks on my C! All my friends will be so jealous that I have my very own B. Thank you for making this the best Christmas ever! Sincerely, Greg", which comes out looking weird when one of the gifts was a pair of pants.
- In Hogfather, Ridcully turns out to be the only one who enjoyed writing thank-you letters as a child (among other Hogfather trappings like playing board games and emptying chimney stockings). He compares the rest of the staff's cynical remembrances to watching men kick apart a dollhouse.
- Horrid Henry: One story reveals that Henry really hates writing thank you letters, due to a combination of laziness and selfishness. Realising that the other children do also, he comes up with the plan of offering to write their thank you letters for them in exchange for money. The idea is a big success, however, when it comes down to it he can't be bothered to actually write all those thank you letters. So instead he types one letter with delete as appropriate phrases (of which none of the options particularly specific or polite) including starting the letter "Dear Sir or Madam", then just prints off multiple copies. This naturally ends up getting all the children in trouble with their angry relatives, including Henry who used the same letter for all his own thank you letters.
- molesworth has a multiple-choice form for thank-you letters.
And i hav [played with it constantly. / bust it already. / no patience with it. / given it to the poor boys. / dismantled it.] I am feeling [very well. / very poorly. / lousy. / in tip-top form. / sick.] I hope you are too.
- A Smart Girls Guide To: In "A Smart Girl's Guide to Manners", the parts that teach how to write thank-you notes talk about how "it's not that bad" and how the girls reading the book "may not love writing thank you notes" but have to do it anyway.
- In the children's book Thank You, Miss Doover, a class has to write thank you notes, but one boy is frustrated because he didn't like the stationery he'd received and had actually used it for his dog to pee on. He writes many letters, but Miss Doover insists he try again, which leads to him calling her "Mrs. Do-over" as a joke.
- The poem "Christmas Thank Yous" by Mike Gower has the narrator writing carefully-worded thank you letters to various relatives whose gifts were poorly thought out in one way or another, before sincerely thanking his grandad ... who just sent him cash.
- Lemony Snicket points out that, because this trope is Truth in Television, "I recommend learning how to write a very good thank-you note. A child who can write a nice thank-you note can turn into a cocaine dealer five years later and be remembered as the child who wrote nice thank-you notes."
- In the Mr. Men books, it took Mr. Slow until Easter to write his thank-you letters.
- In one episode of "Adventures in Wonderland'', Alice has to write a thank-you note to her Aunt Carol for sending her a pair of earmuffs, but she doesn't know how to thank her for such a dull present. But in the final scene, she realizes the earmuffs are a useful gift after all, because they block out the noise when her annoying little brother Brian and his friends get too rowdy.
- Home Improvement: Jill receives a thank-you note from a woman on behalf of her and her husband, leading to this exchange with her son Brad:
Jill: When a man sends a thank-you note, you know his wife is dead.Brad: Then how come you always make us write thank-you notes?Jill: Because I'm trying to change the world, one boy at a time.
- On Mike & Molly, Molly has to hound Mike to get him to help with thank you notes for their wedding gifts. He gets chastised by his friends for handing them out instead of mailing them and then it becomes apparent he thanked each one for the wrong gift.
- Were You Raised by Wolves?:
- Inverted with Nick, who always insists on personally writing thank you notes.
- Many stories that involve thank you notes are about how someone didn't want to write one of these notes. One venting segment — in "Wearing Name Tags, Shopping Yard Sales, Fat-Shaming Pets, and More" — recounted a time when the party hosts printed their thank you notes and left them near the exit for guests to take with them. The venting listener says at the end of her rant "Do you think this is what I want to be doing on a Saturday afternoon?"
- Parodied in The Simpsons episode "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace"; Moe sends a death threat in the mail, to which Homer responds "Oh, great, now we have to send him one".
