With all good wishes.

I’ve read several mealy-mouthed columns in the papers this year decrying the abomination that is electronic Christmas cards. I'm not sure why society automatically assumes an idea someone had 150 years ago = good but an idea someone had 5 years ago = bad, and how we convey festive greetings is no exception.

One friend I worked with a decade ago sent me an e-mail to say Merry Christmas, because she’s just moved house and can’t be doing with yet another stratum of clutter. This led to an exchange of five or six long messages, during which I found out loads about how she and her family were doing, shared our news and a few photos, gossiped about old times and talked her through what it means that one of her kids has been out on the SEN register at school. I have nothing to put on the mantelpiece, but I feel 10 times closer to her than I did at the start of December.

By contrast I've received any number of “physical” cards which contain nothing but a set of names, possibly with a “best wishes” if you’re lucky, or “we must meet up in the new year” even though both parties have been saying that since 2002. What's the point? To assure people you used to know that you're not dead?

Even worse are the impersonal cards where the scribe doesn't even bother to write your name apart from on the envelope. These annoy me so much I'm tempted to put them straight in the recycling bin. If you can't be bothered to write my name, do you really care whether I have a happy Christmas or not?

I’m tempted to cull the list next year. My best friend from Suffolk, the midwife who delivered me, ancient aunts - yes, they can gladly have a handwritten card, complete with letter. People to whom I've never anything to say, I shall cut, and those who fall somewhere in the middle - the Christmas ecard awaits you in 2014!

Festive

Christmas is for children, goes the rhetoric. Well - they’re half right. The only time of year I miss teaching is December, after several years in a CofE primary school. Actively encouraged to make a big fuss, my £5.99 artificial tree would go up for the first of the month without fail. Handing out Christmas cards could be stretched out to 20 minutes when we should have been doing something boring like science, and the last few days would be entirely taken up with watching the Infant Nativity; suffering through the compulsory school Christmas dinner (as teacher, you’re guaranteed to get stuck next to the kid nobody else will sit by because he spits when he talks); colouring in Santa pictures; a paper snowflake production line to rival the slickest Beijing factory; and the occasional word-search to remind the kids what the alphabet looks like. (Before anyone writes in, how much work do you think gets done in the average office on Christmas Eve, huh?)

It is often said that you lose the excitement of Christmas as an adult. This is because adults’ presents are so very dull. No-one ever woke up early for a melon baller and a velour dressing gown. If I thought there was the chance of finding 50 felt-tips, a Terry’s Chocolate Orange and a Care Bear shoved into a pillowcase at the end of the bed, I'd probably still wake up at 4am!

Of course, learning the horrid truth about Father Christmas is a nasty shock that makes you question everything, from the existence of the Tooth Fairy to whether Mr Fluffy really did go to live on a special hamster farm in the country.

If you want to enjoy Christmas as much as you did when you were a kid, just do the same things. Go for a bike ride in the morning; munch your way through a Cadbury’s Selection Box; watch Mary Poppins, and weep piteously because you think your sister got more presents than you.

Merry Christmas!



(The picture below is me c. 1984. Check that out for a Christmas jumper.)