Last year, we stopped sending Christmas cards. We are not sending them this year either. I still feel guilty about it: friends take the trouble to send such nice ones. Part of the problem — as well as laziness — is technology. Emails make one extremely conscious of the number of separate operations required by ‘snail mail’. You need the card (whose choice is also a complicated matter), the envelope, the addresses, the stamp, the pen, the post box, and the energy to write your name hundreds of times. This all seemed worthwhile when one had confidence in the postal system. But ever since the abolition of the ‘second’ post (which was really the abolition of the first post), and the decision to pay its then chief executive, Adam Crozier, more than £1 million a year, the Post Office has become demoralised. In the recent snow, we received nothing for a week. Ever since, parcels and letters have turned up in unchronological bursts or not at all. Christmas cards first became commercial three years after the beginning of the Penny Post. As that great Victorian enterprise collapses, so will they. Future generations will be as amazed that they existed as we are when we hear about the pre-war conventions of calling cards.
Thanks to my learned wife’s latest contribution to our parish magazine, I learn that the association of the robin with Christmas was reinforced by the fact that the first postmen wore scarlet tunics to indicate their Crown service, and became known as robins (is that what a ‘round-robin’ refers to?). The British public took the bird to their hearts as a seasonal emblem and ignored its aggressive character. The robin’s behaviour was carefully recorded by David Lack, a schoolmaster, for his book, The Life of the Robin, published in 1943.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in