SO there you are, you've eaten the chocolates, watched the video, played the game. You might even be wearing the new jumper or jewellery and have already hit the High Street to spend the voucher.

But have you said thank you for them?

An amazing number of people don't. If the art of letter writing is on the way out, then thank you letters must be pretty well extinct. Those of us of a certain age can only cheer at the news. Our Christmas holidays were regularly ruined by hours of writing out by hand "Dear Aunty/ Uncle, Thank you for.. It was lovely/tasty/very useful. I really liked it/will treasure it for ever/have given it to the poor children. We had a very nice/horrible Christmas and hope you did/didn't too. Happy New Year."

But the sad thing is that not only is the thank you letter dead, but so is the thank you phone call, e-mail or often, even a simple acknowledgement that you've even received the gift.

Now we all know what it's like Christmas shopping, trying to find a parking space, battling round the shops, queuing as carrier bags dig into your hands and small children in buggies kick the backs of your legs and spending more than we can afford. We don't ask for medals, but a thank you wouldn't go amiss.

So why is it so hard?

It was pretty tedious in the old days, especially when our unreliable fountain pens would blot on the very last line and we would have to start all over again. A bit of a chew, too, when our children were too young to write their own so we had to do ours and theirs. Still, that was probably easier than trying to persuade stroppy teenagers that before they spend that generous cheque they could at least pick up the phone and say that it had arrived safely.

This is the age of instant communication. Now with the computer, Nigel Molesworth's dream of the Self-Adjusting Thank You Letter has at least come true. The letters that took us from Boxing Day to Twelfth Night to do, can now be knocked out by the average ten-year-old in the time it takes to re-wind a video. But bet most of them don't.

We are meant to be the compassionate generation, in touch with our feelings. Trouble is, we're not so in touch with the feelings of other people. Shame.

Thank you letters seem to belong to an earlier, starchier generation of formal manners. But they were always much more than that. Elderly relatives kept all the thank you letters my boys had sent them. When I found them, carefully kept, when clearing out houses after funerals, it was unbearably moving. A poignant record of their growing up and a link between the generations.

I don't suppose anyone will preserve e-mails, and phone calls vanish into the air. But at least they show that you bothered to think about someone and they, in turn, have thought of you. It matters.

OK, I know it's better to give than to receive and we should give without counting the cost and all that, and no one expects a testimonial in parchment in exchange for a Christmas present.

But a thank you would be nice. So what are you waiting for?

UNLIKELY though it seems, President-elect Bush gives hope to us mothers of sons.

For he, apparently, was a hopeless young man - as so many of them are. He spent his student days playing hard, drinking harder and doing no work, drifted from job to job, had a few false starts in different careers before he finally sorted himself out.

If someone like that can end up as president of the United States, well, there's hope for them all.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/ news/griffiths.html