No one sends Christmas cards any more. Except that I do, and you might, and a few other people do too. But overall, cards have become so expensive, time-consuming and, let’s admit it, unfashionable that many people have abandoned them with some relief. Some of them rather piously tell us the money thus saved is now going to charity. Others, even more piously, say they are no longer sending cards because of the waste of planetary resources, and they now prefer more ecologically sustainable methods of celebrating Christmas. These are often the people who then fly to New York to go Christmas shopping.
I love cards. I like buying them, I like writing them, and most of all, I like receiving them. The first cards usually arrive in the first week of December, months after the first Christmas ads and several weeks after we have first heard Mariah Carey singing ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ in a high-street shop.
These early cards come from the most brutally organised of your friends, who have lists of Things To Do which they don’t need because they have already done them all. But their cards perform a vital function, because they give the rest of us permission to start feeling Christmassy, and as a perennial last-minute shopper, wrapper and giver, I regard them as a timely boot up the backside to actually do something for once.
Most of us cardsters keep two lists: one of all the people we sent cards to last year, and a second of all those who sent them back. The lists are almost identical. I allow everyone a year off, because disasters often happen near Christmas and circumstance may derail you. But if you don’t send me a card for two years running, you’re off the list to be sent one the year after.
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