When you lose a gift, do you tell the giver?
With lots of envelopes being given to us during my daughter's bat mitzvah a few weeks ago, it was almost inevitable that some got lost in the shuffle.
When we entered the gifts in the computer so we could properly thank everyone, there were about five people from whom we hadn't received anything. The question became: Do we tell them or not?
When we have been on the giving side, people have lost our gifts and never told us. We found out either when we tried to balance our checkbook and saw the check had never been cashed, or we got a Thank You note saying "Thank you for the generous gift" when we had given the kid a necklace or a book.
In the end, we decided to tell the people and took the blame ourselves, saying it looks like we lost their gift. There were an assortment of responses: Some said they would write a new check, others said their gifts would be delayed. I'm glad we decided to clear the air instead of always wondering what had happened.
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