What your Christmas card says about you (and it’s not usually very nice)

When a person does something to remind you of their superior status, I often wonder whether he or she is fully in control of what they’re doing. Name-droppers, for instance, often seem to be acting compulsively, as if they’re suffering from a mild personality disorder. Once the impulse to drop the name has been triggered — usually by some circuitous route that only makes sense to the name-dropper — these people can’t stop themselves. The name pops out in spite of the fact that they know it’s gauche. (That’s my excuse, anyway.)

The same is true of Christmas cards. Normally, members of the British aristocracy are fairly reserved when it comes to advertising their privileged status. Indeed, a reluctance to draw attention to your advantages is supposed to be a hallmark of good breeding. However, no such reticence applies when it comes to Christmas cards. A typical missive will feature a patchwork of photographs of the children, each engaging in a high-status pursuit. There’s 11-year-old Tarquin about to bag himself a brace of pheasant, and there’s little India at Val d’Isère. Typically, the card will include one shot of the entire family — and there are never less than four children — standing in front of some ancestral pile. You might as well write ‘We Are Posher Than You’ on the envelope and have done with it.

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Ian Williams

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What accounts for this lapse in judgment? If these same people received a card from Donald Trump with a picture of him standing next to his private Boeing 727, they’d be the first to wrinkle their noses. Perhaps the reason it doesn’t occur to them that there’s anything vulgar about their behaviour is that it’s an annual ritual. They tell themselves that their friends and relatives will actually want to see recent pictures of their children — and these photographs, which look as though they’ve been lifted straight out of the Boden catalogue, just happen to be lying around.