The best Christmas greetings ...by hand and from the heart

ON Monday afternoon I strode up our street to post some Christmas cards for my mother. We have a splendid Edward VII pillar box two blocks up and, as I neared, a very old lady, standing on tiptoe, seemed to be having a protracted wrestling match with its mouth.

I slowed, allowing the coffin’s-length of distance the present times require, and when at length the dowager left the scene – very slowly – I approached, glanced into the slot and gasped.

A few minutes before its daily decanting, at 4pm, the pillar box was full. Utterly full. Stuffed, jammed, all but bloated with mail – and the mass of it, as was evident from the festive stamps on squarish envelopes, was Christmas cards.

It was with great difficulty I added my mother’s contribution to this papery flash mob and, when all that festive mail was finally released and borne away, I do hope poor Postie didn’t have a hernia.

Part of the fun of my job is keeping an eye out for unusual, possibly newsworthy things, l i ke all those early Nowellers who put up Christmas trees in November, and I made online inquiry about a 2020 Christmas card surge.

And one there indeed be. Moonpig reported a big rise in card sales in November. There has been a 7 per cent surge in cards for ‘the holidays’ in America. A survey showed that a third more of us plan to send them than did so last year. Etsy says there has been a 23 per cent bounce in online search for them.

And that is very much against the trend of recent years. Most of us lead busier, time-poor lives, stamps are ever more expensive and the more sanctimonious sort of environmentalist has l ong bewailed the slaughter in trees.

ACCORDINGLY, card sales of every variety have been in decline for years, especially given all the digital (and free) alternatives. Why pick out some relentlessly perky birthday card when you can write some gigglesome greeting on your mate’s Facebook page?

But little about 2020 has been normal. Most of us have relatives we have been unable to see for months. A daily tour of one’s Facebook circle has become dull, many young folk in particular having posted nothing new for months – and no wonder, when it has been a year they largely went nowhere and did nothing.

And those of us fortunate enough to work from home have far more time on our hands – and many of us, for the first time in many a Yule, have bought, penned and mailed dozens and dozens of cards.

‘This could be a powerful moment f or our i ndustry,’ beams one executive. ‘Greeting cards have a unique ability to forge connections.’

A card on your doormat means that someone has gone to trouble. They had to pick out a card for you, write an appropriate salutation or message in their own hand, place it in an envelope, seal it, add a stamp and post the thing.

And the feelings involved are multifaceted, says handwriting expert Emma Bache. ‘The very act of putting pen to paper is very personal. It shows that an individual has taken enough care and enough thought.

‘The much slower process of hand writing a card is much more i ntimate and more thoughtful.

‘It brings joy to the recipient. Most of what we see in the post these days are bills or other unwanted mail. It’s a little bit of character, a little bit of love, especially now.’

Celebrity chef Nigel Slater especially enthuses. ‘The shuffle of envelopes as they fall on the doormat; the quizzical analysis of the handwriting; the tugging of the tightly wedged card from its envelope.

‘The idea that the card has been chosen specially for you and has been handwritten by the sender brings with it a warmth of friendship that no electronic greeting could aspire to. “That has been handwritten”: in the days of texts, emails and tweets, that reads like something out of Dickens.’

It was only with the advent of the penny post, of course, that Christmas cards could be sent at all, and the very first, a batch of 2,000, were all despatched by Henry Cole in December 1843 – the same year that Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol, in all its abiding influence on the way we celebrate the feast.

For that card, Cole commissioned an engraving by the illustrator John Callcott Horsley showing a group of people raising a glass to you, as in the background folk handed out food and clothing to the poor.

Robins quickly became a popular theme, punning on the fact that Victorian postmen wore red jackets and were actually dubbed ‘ robins’ – though it was only in the Great War, with millions of men away from home, that the Christmas card industry really took off.

Trends have come and gone. I always liked those showing brightly lit churches in snowclotted villages. I remember that Christmas cards in the 1970s had a lot of glitter.

ICAN’T fathom the mentality of folk who buy and send smutty cards, even though I know – as an old Free Presbyterian minister once memorably said – that we live in an age that would make a rhinoceros blush.

And, every year, I keep a few of particular meaning. The oldest in my collection was from my f ormer Primary One teacher, in December 1974, and Mrs Kinnis sent me one most years until her death in 2017.

I even have the 1983 envelope – though, understandably, not the crisp £5 note it contained – on which my 84-year-old grandmother had scrawled tenderly, ‘ To the boys from Granny Shawbost to buy ice cream.’

What e- card could compare with that abiding, written sentence from the hand of a loving old lady born in the reign of Queen Victoria?

There are unwritten rules about Christmas cards. If you are unsure whether to send one to a particular individual, then don’t. Don’t send cards to folk you haven’t communicated with for years, and make sure each card is age-appropriate.

Choose cards in ‘portrait’ format; ‘landscape’ ones wilt and fall flat in a few days, knocking other cards over. Whatever Prime Ministers might do, your card should not be a photograph of yourself.

And, please, don’t send one of those ghastly round-robin letters, full of humble bragging about young Roderick’s Duke of Edinburgh Award, those blessed days in your dear little place in Umbria and l i ttle Drusilla’s prowess on the flugelhorn.

Those caveats aside, in this dark and fearful winter such a simple thing as a well chosen, warmly worded card can utterly make someone else’s day at very little cost to you.

One quiet endeavour f or decency in a season which, for all its ruthless commercialisation, we are yet reminded that the Light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.