Glittery minefield of modern Christmas card etiquette

IONCE had a friend called Marjorie M Houston. We never once met, our only connection was – apparently – my newspaper column, and every Christmastide a card from her would arrive, with but one variation each December – ‘Marjorie M Houston (now aged 87!)’

She never confided her address. I could never reply. And, inevitably, for little reason save the obvious, and about two decades ago, the cards ceased. Marjorie passed from my life and, one sadly presumed, her own.

Christmas cards are beautiful. I like the very snowy ones with a dusting of glitter and a village church glowing at dusk.

They are also a bondage. You have to buy the things, subtly grading their quality (and cost) by one’s intimacy with the recipient – the thick, creamy number naturally for your partner and as expensive as a bottle of tolerable French red to, for the paperboy and other near impersonal acquaintances, a cheap charity box number that barely stands up.

Who will be happy with a card merely signed, or be hurt if there is no added personal message? Is this one too slushy for a mate or too flippant for an aunt? Who will appreciate those published by the Trinitarian Bible Society, complete with a line or three from the King James Bible – or immediately recoil as if it were an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale?

One must be sensitive to personal situations or keenly held beliefs. The all-out-for-larfs number you would not, I think, send to someone facing her first festive season as a widow. I shun cards with images of Jesus because most in my admittedly niche faith tradition find these offensive. Others do not keep Christmas at all, and one must launch a second wave for their New Year revelries – such as they are.

Decisions, decisions. Who would appreciate shepherds and kings? Or prefer snowmen and reindeer? Who in our circle is Buddhist, pagan or Jewish?

Who might be aghast if we sent them a card or affronted if we didn’t? Will this lad and lassie, living together and without the sound of wedding bells accept one card jointly or expect a card each? Are you still expected to address a boy below school-leaving age as ‘Master’? Are Fergus and Farquhar just twenty-something G12 flatmates, or a couple?

Be in no doubt – this is a high-stakes business. I was once peremptorily rebuked, by telephone, by a former minister because I had carelessly sent his with-all-good-wishes-for-2004 snowscape with a stamp featuring the Virgin Mary. (I wouldn’t have minded so much, but his church had kicked him out years before for cheating on his wife).

Anyway, all must be signed, with acutely weighed terms of endearment, and stuffed in envelopes, and addressed – much time is invariably lost in grumpy search for a postcode – and sealed, and stamped and fed en masse in a shovelling motion into the nearest pillarbox, before you stump home in the frost humming King Jesus Had A Garden.

Two dark rites now follow. In the weeks ahead you find yourself keeping mental note of which of those you have postally honoured does not reciprocate. They will, of course, be stricken from next year’s list.

But it’s odds-on, too, you will find yourself dashing out into the sleet about December 23 in quest for still another card and stamp, dratting quietly, after receipt of be-robined benediction from someone you had not yourself thought to honour. There are always those sad cards that come in late during the sherry-and-satsumas ennui between Yule and New Year.

And cards in general say much about the taste and judgment of their senders. Smutty cards greatly reduce your respect; irreverent, Christ-mocking ones still more.

Some you recognise even before you unfold them: public bodies of such eminence as, say, the Western Isles Health Board always send enormous photographic things and with a timid ‘Season’s Greetings’, lest some snowflake of an agnostic takes ‘Happy Christmas’ as a micro-aggression.

THOSE featuring the gaudy artwork of children invariably come from your MSP, and modern Prime Ministers like to send pictures of themselves. I know this because as chairman of his local Conservative association, my brother qualified as one of David Cameron’s 160,000 close friends.

I think that rather common. But my bête noire – and surely, in this, I am not alone – is any card including a folded roundrobin letter of some family’s 2018 larks. The sad demise of Mozart the moggie and acquisition of Precious the bichon frise (with much detail of the jolly journey to collect him from Melrose). The ten days en famille in dear Tuscany; intolerable screeds on Drusilla’s prowess on the flugelhorn; Crispin’s Cambridge interview and how Joaquim so enjoys his training at Nasa.

That is rivalled perhaps only by the unnerving experience of some friends, who annually receive cards from someone evidently elderly dedicated to a family who have not lived at that address since the Heath administration. Or the card – and we have all been there – of signature so minimalist (‘Who is Bill?’) you have not the foggiest notion of who sent it.

Nor is the annual Christmas data-dump these days cheap. You sometimes wonder if it would be more affordable to fly about Scotland in a helicopter scattering pound notes at random… which reminds me wistfully of my schooldays, when cards from aunties were apt to include a fiver.

Many have therefore desisted from the custom. For a while, it was fashionable simply to advertise your festive goodwill in columns in the local newspaper – at least, when people still read local newspapers.

The more righteous would even exhort friends not to send them any cards but instead donate to some sponsor-a-goat project in Eritrea. Then there was a fashion for animated Christmas cards by email. I still cherish one Boris Johnson sent me in his days as editor of The Spectator, even though it took 20 minutes to upload by dial-up internet. It featured BoJo flying over whited London, saying ‘Crikey!’ at regular intervals.

OTHERS have been more ill-judged. Prince Charles was mocked for an offering 20 years ago featuring a photograph of his simpering self flanked by William and Harry standing in urns. Someone inevitably asked if they were Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men – and he The Weed.

Ed Miliband in 2017 ickily reinvented himself as a beleathered biker (brandishing a bacon sandwich). Alex Salmond’s offering as First Minister inclined to the creepy – in 2009, it featured a blank-eyed girl with an enormous Saltire.

But pride of place surely goes to Gordon Brown who, in December 2009, posted an extraordinary photograph of a ceramic ornament – the tiny, porcelain step and front door of Number 10 – adorning a Christmas tree. And hanging, prophetically, by a thread.