Last weekend, for the first time in my life, I prepared a Christmas card address list. I decided, in my sixth decade, it was time for a go-to computer file of street names, numbers and postcodes that would serve me handsomely in years to come.
It would no longer do to be asking my nearest and dearest every December to remind me where they lived, so I rummaged around in emails and text messages from previous Decembers and compiled my exhaustive inventory.
After an hour, it seemed the work was done and I stared with some consternation at the list of names and addresses. There were just six entries. Who was missing? No one obvious.
Salutations
Admittedly the grand total of those receiving festive salutations in an envelope from me is a little higher than that. The neighbours get theirs hand-delivered. The lady of the house will find hers on the kitchen table on Christmas Eve – and hers won’t be out of a box but chosen specially.
But that really is as far as the 2024 mailing list goes. My extended family is vast – too big these days to remember the names of every single partner (and whether they’re still together) and little one, far less have a fix on their postcodes.
Besides, exchanging Christmas cards, we seem to have decided, was something our parents did. We just friend each other on Facebook and occasionally click ‘like’ on each other’s photos.
Through my working life I’ve come to know an enormous number of potential recipients of my festive good wishes – colleagues past and present, contacts, politicians, PRs. Sure, we email each other, text, exchange social media messages… but Christmas cards? It’s all a bit 1980s, isn’t it?
My memory goes back a little further than that to primary school in the 1970s when practically every pupil would hand out cards to practically every classmate, even the ones we didn’t particularly like.
The tradition of writing Christmas card is a vanishing art…and soaring stamp prices do not help
Not forgetting the teacher. Indeed, I suspect we were often more diligent in submitting her card than our homework.
At home, we’d be deluged with the things. My father, a TV journalist at the time, received dozens from people I’d never heard of. It turned out they were colleagues, contacts, politicians and PRs.
As many as 15 or 20 could arrive in a single day and this would go on for almost a month. Relatives from the remotest corners of the family tree never failed to post their Christmas greeting, even if we hadn’t seen them in years.
It seemed, in fact, that this was the whole point. The festive season was the time to re-establish contact, to reaffirm the ties that bind, however threadbare or loose we considered them during the rest of the year.
I have little memory of ‘Aunt Ella in Ireland’ – so called to differentiate her from ‘Aunt Ella in Carnoustie’ – and, at this remove, might need a genealogist’s assistance in disseminating our exact blood relationship, but I remember her Christmas cards well.
There were cards from neighbours from several homes ago: the Inglises from Burnside, Glasgow; the Simpsons from Richmondhill Road, Aberdeen.
And, inside them, summaries of the year about to end. The bragging ones: ‘Fiona graduated with a 2:1 from Edinburgh in the summer. Such a clever thing. We’re all so terribly proud of her…’
Jonathan is posting just six cards this festive season although there are no guarantees any will arrive in time
The foreboding ones:
‘Jimmy’s not been so well this year – test results due in January, but he’s still enjoying his garden…’
They could often fill the entire blank space on the left-hand side of the card. Sometimes, recognising the space constraints, the sender would enclose a full letter.
When I’d arrive in St Andrews to spend Christmas with my mother in the 1990s, she would present me with the full bundle to wade through. It could take hours.
‘Who are these people?’ I’d say frequently, on seeing names I didn’t recognise.
‘Oh, that’s your cousins in South Africa.’
‘I have cousins in South Africa?’
‘Not first cousins. Third or fourth cousins maybe. Isn’t their card lovely? And full of news!’
There was a sense of urgency to read every card because they were about to go on display. Not on shelves or mantelpieces, obviously – they were already crammed – but Sellotaped together into huge square blocks to be Blu Tacked to the walls with golf ball-sized blobs of the stuff to bear the weight.
I look round my shelves and mantelpiece today. Still bags of room. I check the mail box. Empty.
Meagre
Have I, then, left it a little late to compile my meagre address list? Are Christmas cards simply over in the 2020s? Or does my list’s unnerving brevity owe to a failure on my part to uphold the tradition so assiduously observed by my parents?
I don’t doubt that my indolence has prompted my removal from a good few address lists. There are only so many years senders are prepared to see their efforts unreciprocated and, where regrettable lapses have happened, they are right to take a pen through my name.
But I sense that is not all that has happened. John Lewis reports a 23 per cent drop in sales of boxed cards in 2024, while individual cards are 15 per cent down.
For years, environmentalists have tutted at the scale of the waste of paper to which the greetings card industry incites us to contribute – particularly at Christmas. Send an e-card, they urge. Or at least use recycled paper.
For similar reasons, they’d rather we wrapped our presents in old newspapers. And a Merry Christmas to you too.
Stamps have gone from costing pennies to costing pounds. In the course of 2024 alone, first-class ones have increased three times, rising from £1.10 in January to £1.65 now.
Princely
Where my six posted cards would have cost me £6.60 last Christmas, it was £9.90 at the weekend – or it would have been if I could have scored a book of six.
A princely £13.20 was the cost for eight.
How out of pocket I would be if I shared my mother’s diligence in sending cards to the most distant corners of the Earth on the most tenuous family tree premise, I dread to imagine.
And how many of them would even get there today? A Daily Mail investigation this week found that, of 100 cards with first class stamps sent to addresses across the UK, only 16 arrived on the next working day. More than two weeks later, eight households were still waiting for theirs.
For those you omit to send cards to in 2024 – though you have received greetings from them – the sclerotic performance of the Royal Mail looks like an increasingly serviceable fib to tell.
I know I should have tried harder in years gone by. I remember a decade or so ago my mother profusely thanking my brother for a Christmas card he had sent, telling him it had made her day. Mine, I seem to remember was, er, stuck in the post.
I do hope this year’s pathetically small mail-shot doesn’t suffer the same fate.
And, if you’re not one of the six, I know, I’m useless. But Merry Christmas.
Love, Jonathan.
j.brocklebank@dailymail.co.uk
