I was standing at the post box studying a fan of white envelopes, Christmas-cards about to be posted to bring seasonal joy; one for someone I went with to Dorset in 2017. As we joined the world’s best traffic jam, right opposite Stone Henge, she said, ‘I don’t know why people go and look at those old bricks’. I should have turned the car around but didn’t. Bad holidays always seem to go wrong from the start and since we parted a week later, we haven’t spoken. Once a year we keep in touch by card as neither wants to be the one to stop. Another was off to a friend from Sunday School where we met aged eight. We had a robust friendship until she had grandchildren. Now I hardly hear from her. Then one to someone who was in my teenage gang. The problem was her first husband. I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me. Although the marriage was only brief our friendship lingers on joylessly.
This is the time of year for greeting people by card who you no longer like and never see. A friend said that a man he met once on holiday fifty years ago always sends him one so he has to send one back as, ‘an obligation’. It was nice to know that men also go through this as the annual card attrition seems to be mainly women’s work, due to their refined sense of duty, kindness, and what remains of British good manners. Most other nations no longer bother, preferring grotesque electronic things. The UK card industry made about £1.7bn last year, according to the Greeting Card Association lobby group, which estimates that Britons send almost a billion Christmas cards, more than any other nation. Some hardy souls say they are not sending any due to the price of stamps, or as a demonstration of piety, donating the money to pangolins instead. For reasons I cannot fathom without therapy, I seem to be stuck with it.
There’s a relative I have met twice, but is she still alive? No answer to phone calls. She used to spend Christmas in Monte Carlo. Perhaps she was there, at the roulette wheel while I was posting in the drizzle, more likely, at ninety-seven, she was no more. That brought back painful memories of what my mother went through when her friends were all dying or dead and relatives, particularly sons, didn’t bother to let her know, even after she specifically asked, in her Christmas cards, to be kept informed. The Christmas card telegraph system can turn into an instrument of cruelty.
Every year I do try to cut people off the list. I managed it this year with a male friend who used to loaf in my flat, never saying when he was going to leave, complaining bitterly about his successive partners. After he found one to marry, I was never invited to visit. I have been offended by that for years, so he was finally off. I also slaughtered a ‘round Robin’ who made desperate boasts about its chicks and grand chicks, even their mental health issues and criminal offenses. Also gone were the relatives in Inverness who usually send nothing but a signature. Two days after I sent off my ambivalent greetings, four cards fell onto the mat. It seemed surprising that other people are also doing it. Even more unlikely, the first one was from the ‘male friend,’ I’d dropped. A simple greeting and no message, but a change of address and no mention of his wife. The round robin had bobbed back and I was almost pleased as it offers my only contact with the village where I grew up. Another from a relative of the old lady, giving her new care-home address. That must have been some kind of seasonal telepathy. The far-flung relatives sent a very friendly message, family news and even a suggestion that we might meet! I hunted out a card large enough to contain a letter, and wrote back straightaway.
