Miss Manners: Guest dries off with hand towel

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I have a longtime friend who seems to consider herself very well-mannered. She writes her thank-you notes on cards and mails them, while I send my thank-yous by email.

When I tell her she doesn’t need to do a handwritten thank-you, she says, “My mother taught me to always do it that way.” Of course, that makes me feel “less than” for my emailed thanks.

When she comes to visit me, she always brings a hostess gift. It’s very thoughtful, although it’s usually something I can’t use. I appreciate the gesture, though.

She knows that my guest bedroom and bathroom are stocked for the use and comfort of my guests. Yet, when she takes a shower, she only uses the hand towel to dry herself. She uses a bath towel at home.

I assume she feels it is somehow more polite to not soil a bath towel, but to make do with a hand towel. I don’t say anything about it, but it feels like an insult to me. I am trying to provide everything to make a guest feel at home. How should I handle this?

GENTLE READER: Whoops! Miss Manners was about to chastise you for criticizing your friend’s good manners, and even to insinuate that you were doing so to justify your own lower standard. Take that!

But then she got to the part about the hand towel.

What was your friend’s thinking? That she would deprive herself of being comfortably dry in order to spare you the effort of laundering a larger towel?

OK, that crosses the border into rudeness. It suggests that hospitality is burdensome to you, to the extent that you would appreciate a guest’s discomfort.

There is not much you can do about it without seeming to suggest that your guest is not bathing. (Then again, perhaps she is not.) Just keep putting out the towels – perhaps saying, pointedly, “These are for your use” as you supply them.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My son is getting married. Besides me (his mother), he has his maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, paternal step-grandmother and paternal great-grandmother. Some of these have living spouses, and some do not.

Who sits where? What order are we seated? He is blessed with longevity in his family, but leaves his mother perplexed.

GENTLE READER: Even if it were common to have families as lucky in longevity as yours, there would be no corresponding seating chart. No good would come of ranking an entire family that closely.

It is customary for the couple’s progenitors to sit in the front row of their respective sides. If the row is not long enough, other relatives should file in politely behind them, without making a fuss over exactly where.

Miss Manners appreciates your family’s apparent lack of old feuds among these relatives – it is simpler when there is no need to scuffle for advantage.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Is there a tradition to leave an envelope unsealed when it is delivered by hand? And, if so, why?

GENTLE READER: Yes. It means, “I trust you not to snoop.”

Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website www.missmanners.com.