11:11am Monday 14th December 2009
By Catherine Cain
Writing Christmas cards is such a chore, isn’t it? If you are anything like me, you probably bought a fine selection to inscribe back in early November and have been studiously avoiding the horrible task ever since.
Now, with just a few days to go, I am feeling horribly oppressed. Every time I catch sight of those unopened packs of charity cards lurking on the dining room table, I feel a compelling urge to run away and seek refuge in a box of mince pies in the hope that a helpful Christmas elf might take pity and magically complete the task for me.
Right now, if I had Aladdin’s lamp at my disposal the genie would have RSI.
The main problem for me is that I am pathologically incapable of writing something simple.
Mindful that I am a very bad friend / relative / former workmate (insert where appropriate) and haven’t bothered to make contact at any point in the preceding 12 months, my sense of shame drives me to write a personal message in each card that rivals Gone With the Wind in terms of drama, incident and prolixity.
What should take at most a couple of hours while listening to something soothing like the Archers omnibus on Radio 4, possibly rounded off with a self-congratulatory swig of Baileys, actually takes several days.
There I am hunched over the table, desperately trying to think of something witty and personal to say to Auntie June, and all the while I am keenly aware that the clock is ticking and that I’ve got another 123 cards to write. In terms of creative inspiration, that’s a killer.
Mind you, at least I haven’t yet stooped to the subterranean levels of the photocopied ‘round robin’ Christmas greeting. Admittedly, some of these can be hugely amusing (for all the wrong reasons), but more often they are a nauseating exercise in self-congratulation and one-upmanship.
A particularly irritating example I saved for reference from a couple of years back was from a far-flung former work colleague, who, as Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet might have observed, had “made a good match”.
Referring to her husband throughout as “Alpha Male” – something that set my teeth on edge from a cursory perusal of the first paragraph – Sarah (name has been changed to protect the irksome) proceeded to give a blow-by-blow account of a year that largely featured buying a Ferrari, getting Fergus into Eton, holidaying in the Maldives (twice) and buying a holiday mansion in Devon with Alpha Male’s bonus.
I know that this smacks of soul-warping envy, but I think you’ll sympathise with my powerful air punch and strangulated yelp of ‘Ye-es’ when this year’s gripping instalment contained news of Alpha Male’s shocking redundancy from his American banking corporation.
To be fair though, at least ‘Sarah’ is still bothering to send Christmas cards (and, thankfully, this year’s did not feature a photograph of the Family Smug arranged around a red-ribboned Ferrari in the snow - probably because Alpha Male has been forced to put it on eBay).
I was a bit shocked last week to receive the following group email from an old university chum.
“Hello girls,” Becky began, optimistically but, these days, sadly inaccurately. “Just wanted to let you know that we are jetting off to Tanzania on the 19th and that I’m not going to bother to send cards this year to anyone except for the needy and the elderly. As I don’t count any of you in either of those categories, this will have to do.” She then described, in some detail, the wonders of the holiday awaiting her, signing off with a jaunty, “Happy Christmas one and all, or Krismasi Njema!”
(As, apparently, they say in Tanzania)
I was torn between gut-wrenching envy and downright annoyance - not only was she spending Christmas Day on the beach, but she’d managed to neatly and succinctly evade the most boring annual duty.
How dare she not ‘bother’ sending us all a card!
If only Becky had put a little more thought into her Advent timetable and a little less thought into organising a three-night Jeep safari beginning on Boxing Day, then I think you’ll find there might have been plenty of time to think about her poor housebound chums who will be dealing with a giant turkey carcass on December 26th rather than riding majestically across the Serengeti with a local Masai guide called Ngemi.
Much as I loathe the thought of writing all those cards each year, I do think it’s one of those Christmas rituals that are completely obligatory – like leaving mince pies out for Santa, buying slippers (again) for your granddad, thinking about going to Midnight Mass, trying just one Brussels sprout even though you regard them as a vegetable abomination or listening the “Now That’s What I Call Christmas” compilation CD on an everlasting loop for 31 days.
And, of course, the other point to consider is that I do like to be on the receiving end of a very large stash of festive cards. I’m like one of those needy souls who desperately attempt to email everyone they know in order to fill up the space on their Facebook wall. Only there’s something so much more impressive and public about a mantelpiece full of cards, don’t you think?
So, I have to admit that one of the reasons I send so many cards each year, grudgingly spending hour after hour attempting to mine nuggets of seasonal originality at the coalface of festive cheer, is the sneaking thought that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t actually get any back.
I mean, I don’t want to look like Noddy No-Mates at Christmas, do I?
(Which is at least honest, if not entirely in keeping with the spirit of the occasion.)
Anyway, this year I’ve just got another 73 cards to write before tottering off to the post box and I’m expecting a bumper haul in return – although I imagine that if ‘Sarah’ and Becky ever read this, I’ll be permanently expunged from their Christmas card lists.
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