Opinion by J1 reporter Delaney Villarreal.

You gotta love the Christmas season. With the snow comes the stress of trying to find the perfect Christmas gifts for your friends and family.

You spend a ton of time and money buying gifts for people who will probably never use them and will never think to appreciate your individual efforts.

In fact, they might even get offended by the gift you give. Everyone has that one aunt who has been shunned for daring to give a pair of socks two years in a row.

In this upcoming Christmas season, I have to encourage you to maintain proper manners.

Even if you burn those horrific green and red socks right after you open them, writing a proper thank you note is key to keeping good relations.

Kids always whine and complain about why they have to write long and boring thank you notes to family members they see twice a year.

But, the tradition of saying please and thank you after receiving a gift is necessary to display gratitude for the gift in question and also for the time and thought the other person put into it.

As much as people want you to be happy and pleased with the gift, they do want to know that you appreciate them.

This is but one example of why proper manners should be observed at every occasion.

Manners enable you to show a person that you are thinking of them and their well-being.

Keeping the basic manners will ensure you a good Christmas and a flawless system of social norms for which to guide your actions.