Bless You update

The other day I walked into my office. I had barely set foot in the room when my office mate spun around and said: “Shay-non, I have question for you”, I expectantly held my breath, since as we’ve already established these questions could take us anywhere, “today in class I sneeze and somebody say bless – is this okay?”
We followed up our previous sneezing/blessing/thanking conversation by running through this case study. Apparently he sneezed in class and was quite surprised that somebody said bless you. After our previous lengthy discussion of that convention I was a bit surprised at his surprise until I realized that he thought that this breaks the other convention of not talking during class (though how strictly that one needs to be laid out is debatable). We agreed upon the fact, that with somebody sneezing, class had already been more or less disrupted so that a friendly “blessing” is not adding insult upon insult.
Then we got back into the whole issue of saying “Thank you” after somebody saying “bless you”. This one had been quite confusing for him in our previous exploration of the subject because I couldn’t give him an exact protocol on when to say thanks and when not, though I assured him that it wasn’t offensive not to say anything.
At one point, during the Thanking-non-Thanking part of our conversation I realized that he probably didn’t know what bless you really meant. “Do you know what ‘bless you’ means?”, “yes, when somebody sneeze –“, “No, the word blessing, do you know what a blessing is?”.
Turns out he didn’t. So I tried to explain it to him as simple but accurately as possible: “A blessing is a good thing you get from somebody that you didn’t earn for yourself and maybe don’t even deserve. When blesses you, they are giving you something good. And if somebody is giving you something good you didn’t deserve or wishing a good thing upon you – we should thank them, shouldn’t we?”
Shouldn’t we?

Happy Thanksgiving