My wife Clare and I dispatched our first round of Christmas cards for the year on 10 December. We send our Christmas cards in two rounds, sometimes three:
- those that are hand-written on real card (early December)
- electronic cards in response to cards received
- electronic cards to people on our card list we’ve not yet heard from (final week or so before Christmas)
The emphasis on electronic cards is not an accident. They help resolve what we once felt as a dilemma, between the individual hand-written card and the round-robin. The hand-written card lets you personally address the people you’re writing to. But it’s very labour-intensive, and it risks being illegible. On the other hand, the printed round-robin, easy to produce in numbers and with a clear typeface, can be embarrassing to all concerned. In the noughties, journalist Simon Hoggart wittily demonstrated the pitfalls, more than once.
The electronic card can be read without difficulty; its text can be copied and pasted from card to card, with far less labour than in wielding a pen; and it can be totally adapted to suit the individual it’s addressed to. So it gets our vote, and we hope the recipients feel the same. A popular site for sending such things is Jacquie Lawson. We use her services, and also http://www.e-cards.com/. Plenty of other sites can be visited for this purpose too.
Not all of our friends and kin are wired, and some have stated a preference for cards hand-written on real card. These people represent a sizeable minority, around a quarter of our card list, and theirs, as you see, are the cards we send first.
Two approaches
I’m not quite sure how long we’ve been following this system, and its development hasn’t left the trace in old diaries that I thought it might. Probably we decided we were going to adopt it after Christmas 2001. At our first married Christmas, 1998, we discovered that the card practices of our single days had been widely dissimilar. Clare entered the marriage with a practice of sending cards to pretty well everyone in her address book. I, on the other hand, expected to send cards only in response to those I received. I liked to say, of those I got and answered after Christmas and into January, that they were spreading one of the most enjoyable aspects of Christmas into the part of the year that most needed it. I reckoned, being an obsessive correspondent before we married, that people I didn’t write to at Christmas would probably get something from me later on.
Be it admitted, I can’t say that now.
The main drawback to Christmas e-cards is this. While our labour-saving approach to Christmas cards is to send them electronically, our labour-saving approach to Christmas decoration is to put up almost nothing more than our incoming Christmas cards. Sooner or later, as our friends and kin catch on to the benefits of Christmas e-cards, there’s going to come a Christmas where we don’t get any cards suitable for putting up. Printed-out sheets of A4 will probably not make a good substitute.
That was how we saw the future in 2010, when I blogged on this subject. Fourteen years later, it seems incoming Christmas cards will still be numerous enough to decorate our living room.
Another development, after more than twenty years of this system, is that phase 3 (electronic cards to people on our card list we’ve not yet heard from) has largely disappeared. So what we do now is essentially as per Clare for the first batch, the card cards, and as per me for all the rest. It works well enough.
How do you do your Christmas? (Or equivalent.)
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