One of the more stressful parts of being a mother of young children was the lashing-to-the-mast that was required when it came to writing the birthday and Christmas thank you letters.

It was an ordeal from start to finish. The start was the hellish overture that was that panic as the wrapping paper was being ripped off that I hadn’t written down who gave them what. A failure to get this right in the orgy of unwrapping that seemed to be the case every time, infamously once resulted in a call from an apoplectic grandmother who had been thanked rapturously by my son for the Minecraft t-shirt that he so clearly loved.

“I have no idea what I’m being thanked for. I didn’t give it and, what’s more, I would never give it. Looks like a computer game and I don’t approve of computer games.’

Getting thank you letters done

Oh, the drawn-out agony, bribery, cajolery and then plain fury of trying to get a child of any age to sit down and write a letter. There are grey hairs that I can attribute to the task.

Aged 7-12, they’re too busy rushing around to sit down and write anything down, let alone trap their ever-fizzing brains and mouths in the rigidity and formality they imagined was required for a thank you letter. No matter how much I told them to write as if they were speaking to the recipient and to just chatter as if in a conversation with them, they resolutely ignored me and wrote as if they were writing at the point of a gun.

‘Thank you for my lovely (fill in the blank) ____. It is nice. I like to play with it / listen to it / read it / wear it. I hope you are well. Love from Child One.’

In my role as a generous aunt or godmother, I receive enough of these painful missives to realise that the problem is universal. The trouble is that I still like getting them. Even the most cursory of scribbles - my favourites were the ones crammed into the top left-hand corner of a piece of writing paper, leaving vast acres of blank page which I promptly recycled into shopping list paper - showed (a) that they’d got it (always a worry with our postal system (b) that these children could actually write and sometimes in rather handsome, old-fashioned copperplate and (c)  that they or their mother/father  felt sufficiently grateful to make the effort to write. A text message from their parents, ‘Sylvie loves her Polly Pocket’, on the other hand, just doesn’t cut it in my book.

Aged 13-18, teenagers are usually just too grumpy. They can’t be cajoled into writing. They meet parental accusations of being spoilt and ungrateful with sneers and shrugs and a request to move because you’re blocking their view of the gaming monitor. Only blackmail or outright bribery works and often even this only results in half-written scrawls found under the bed, unsent, several months later.

This is why getting a thank you letter from a teenager makes you feel like the sun has come out and bathed you in life-giving light - because you know what they and their parents went through to get this done. My favourite one of these went something like this, written by a niece who was flexing her muscles as an anarchist.

‘Thank you for the makeup bag. I quite like it. I would like it more if I didn’t think that makeup is a yoke enforced on us women by the patriarchy and that the day that I buy makeup is the day I chop off my right breast as the tax to society that I clearly feel my femininity to be. But as a bag without a preset function, it’s alright.’

With thank you letters from teenagers being both as rare and sometimes as unexpected as this was (the writer of this one is now out in the working world, marketing smoothies to credulous Instagrammers with no sign of obvious anarchic intentions), there is a definite lowering of expectations.

Getting a text or WhatsApp message still feels a little cut-price Primark compared to the Prada of the hand-written note, but I fall back on the comforting mantra that it is the thought that counts.

Still, nothing beats the thunk of heavy-grained written letters onto your doormat. Anyone's day is enlivened by thank-you letters in a way that casual digital messages, strewn with labour- and emotion-saving emojis, are not.

So I still dutifully sit myself down and write my mother and brother, what my sarcastic children call A Model Thank You Letter…

At least three unique sentences on how the gift:

• (i) meets the needs perfectly
• (ii) is unusual and clearly personally chosen, and
• (iii) is adding to life’s bounty in many and colourful ways;

that also gets over the page, tells the recipient how the sender/sender’s family are and signs off with a funny story that conveys something of the Christmas spirit that the recipient will recognise as being tailor made for them.

Not that I’m bragging or anything….

What do the generations think?

ELLIE, 26, LONDON

I've never actually written a thank you letter. Instead, my mum would shove a phone to my ear on Christmas, so that I could mumble, ‘Thanks for my book token,” to my relatives. I didn't really see the point. Surely they knew that I'd much rather be spending the day with my new Furby toy.

Thankfully, as I got older, a WhatsApp seemed to do the trick.

I don’t see the difference between a heartfelt text, and a heartfelt letter. In fact, in some ways, texts could be the better option: it’s instant so delivers immediate gratification, doesn’t waste paper, so better for the environment, and doesn’t add to the clutter of a ‘cards drawer’.

JOHN, 43, LEIGHTON BUZZARD

It’s more than eleven months ago, but I still feel the pain of January as if it were this morning. My wife Marie outsourced the job of getting our sons, aged 12 and 10, to write to their grandma and grandad because, she said, it was my parents who wanted the thank you letters in the first place.

Don’t tell Marie but I ended up paying them a tenner each to do the letters. Honour was served. I even made them get onto a second page though my youngest’s handwriting was suspiciously large by that time.

The day after I sent them, Marie got a thank you letter from her niece. She’d given her a block-printing kit and the whole letter - all three pages of it - was printed painstakingly. Marie was beyond made-up and told the boys that as a result, she was going to give her niece an even more generous present next Christmas. Later our eldest came up to me. “Dad? Can I write that thank you letter again? I think I can do it better….”

JULIET, 82, RIPON

The generation gap raises its ugly head yet again, this time about the question of how do you thank for hospitality? Granny has done her nut trying to produce food that will please all the recipients and not involve too much hard work;  guests of her own generation will hurry to write a formal letter before they forget what it is about;  daughters secretly think that in today’s world an e-mail is more than adequate and saves the soaring cost of a stamp (I agree);  and the teenagers hope that if they sound enthusiastic enough immediately after the meal / weekend / cheque / present or whatever, they will get away without even a text.

Unfortunately for my grandchildren, however, I take a strong line that I have done all the work and they have had some fun, and the least they can do when they get home is to thank me. I don’t want a handwritten letter - and I would think my old, near-sighted, shaky-handed friends would feel the same because none of us can read young handwriting - but the least they can do is fly those little thumbs across the iPhone at the speed of light and get a quick “thanks Gran” done then and there. Is it really too much to ask?