I’m predicting a 2020 Christmas card comeback

Here’s my top tip for winter 2020: I predict a long overdue renaissance of (little drummer boy roll, please) the Christmas card. Imagine it: home and hearth aglow with seraphim and sleigh bells, reindeer and wreaths, Raphael Madonnas and Brueghel hunters.

I say this as someone who hasn’t posted so much as an atmospheric snowscape for about four years – and I’m not even a millennial. My bad.

Yet the sitting room and hallway were still festooned with medieval nativities and frosted robins. It routinely elicited gasps from guests.

Sometimes, they owned up to feeling intimidated by my breathtaking popularity; always a nice filip for small-minded hostesses everywhere. They weren’t to know that because our younger daughter attended a faithbased primary school, I – sorry, she – was guaranteed 29 cards from friends.

She’s now moved to a multicultural City academy where Eid is arguably a bigger deal than Christmas, so no more ice-skating Santas for us.

But in this extraordinary year of separation, I am minded to give rather than receive. After years of festive stress, e-greetings and lazy, emojistrewn texts, it suddenly feels right to take a moment to pen a meaningful message in just the right card.

Those convivial Zoom chats and jolly Whatsapp calls, while a source of joy, don’t always convey the depth and breadth of our feelings.

Here in the second lockdown, more of us have the time, head space and the incentive to express on paper what we might struggle to say out loud.

I’m of the generation that still has a tatty address book, if only I could find it. It’s as much a repository of memories as a list of house numbers and postcodes, and worth lingering over.

Buying charity cards is also a way to boost the coffers of organisations that have suffered dreadfully this year.

All in all, it’s a virtuous circle rather than a chore; when we tell loved ones we’re thinking of them, they will be reminded every time they glimpse the gilded cherubim on their mantelpiece.