Christmas Crackers
Whether you enjoy or endure it, it’s that time of year again. Perhaps you’ve had enough of festive products being slipped onto supermarket shelves since the summer heatwaves. Maybe you’ve been spooning brandy cream merrily onto mince pies and calling it one of your 5-a-day since Halloween. Either way, the holidays are upon us. I became familiar with the term “Happy Holidays” when I lived in the States.
At first, it felt jarringly generic, but I finished up enjoying its inclusivity, and flexibility. Like a lot of people, I haven’t sent a Christmas card in years. It’s easy to see how they’ve fallen out of favour in this insta-life we star in, some of us more reluctantly than others. No-one needs more recycling fodder and who has time to put pen to paper anymore? But I started thinking about the giving and receiving of Christmas cards – nostalgically remembering the satisfaction of filing through a hefty wad of freshly inked, crisp white envelopes before balancing a tower of season’s greetings on the counter at the post office, hoping to have made the second class cut-off. And upon receipt of one, there was the unmistakable shape and rigidity that differentiated a cherished Christmas card from the flimsiness of an unwelcome gas bill on the doormat. A relative or friend, an old classmate or ex-colleague, a neighbour or new acquaintance had thought about you, and had taken the time to sit down and let you know.
The Christmas card itself was created in 1943 for the purpose of abbreviating and replicating long, handwritten letters to family and friends at Christmas, which were a societal expectation of Victorian England. A busy Henry Cole was also clearly pushed for time. So if you’re tired of texting a Happy Christmas and receiving a TLDR in return, (iykyk), you might consider dusting off the old fountain pen and doing it the old-fashioned way this year, too. At least you won’t have to write by candle light.
