What killed the Christmas card?

Marcus Berkmann got fewer cards this Christmas than last. So did everyone he knows. An ancient seasonal custom is slowly shrinking into non-existence...

Next Christmas there will be fewer cards still ( Ping Zhu)

Sometime during the next few days, the Christmas tree will come down and be left outside the front door, in the beautiful expectation that a man in a high-vis jacket will take it away. The tinsel will be put back in its box and restored to the loft for another 11 months. (Is that a whimper we can hear from within? A stoically suppressed sob?) And the fairy lights, which failed on 22 December, and only cost a few quid: what will we do with them? Throwing them away feels like a crime committed against our children’s future, a little like flying to the Amazon jungle and personally cutting down a tree. Yet we cannot repair them. We know not how. So we put them in the box with the tinsel, in the wild hope that they will somehow “get better” by December 2016. It’s possible. Stranger things have happened.

The real sign that Christmas is over, though, is that there are no more Christmas cards to come. Every one we were ever going to receive arrived and was displayed in one of the usual ways: lined up on shelves, sellotaped to bits of string, suspended with ribbons from the ceiling, Blu-Tacked to walls or elderly relatives who don’t move much. You got fewer cards this Christmas than last. So did I. So did everyone we know. This thought brings a new, melancholy flavour to the traditional Christmas emotional menu of boredom, resentment and disappointment. Next Christmas there will be fewer cards still. An ancient seasonal custom is slowly shrinking into non-existence.

What killed the Christmas card? I blame the robins myself, with their red breasts and their expressions of ineradicable smugness. And the snowmen and the Santas, and the price of postage, and the way so many of us have of putting long lists of names at the top of each card followed by another long list at the bottom. Dear Barbara, Dave, Liam, Jocasta, Bette and Dave Jr. Happy Christmas! Love from Katy, Dave, Olly, George and Lily. The well-prepared keep lists of their friends’ children’s names in a file for this very purpose. But we know that most of these cards were dashed off in a single evening. We know, because that’s what we did ourselves.

Some cards have a job to do. They are an apology for not having been in touch at all over the preceding year. After a while, the excuses (“Haven’t stopped for a moment!”) become nearly as empty as the promises (“We must get together in the new year!”). The simple act of writing these palpable fibs becomes slightly depressing in itself.

Gradually the list of people you send cards to is reduced. Some of them die, others move away, and one or two of them you wouldn’t recognise if you bumped into them in the street. But they are not replaced. We rarely send cards to new people. Why not? For fear that we might not get one back? And very few young people send cards. It’s something their parents did, and they can’t really see the point.

I feel a little sad about this. Maybe it’s the suspicion that Christmas cards are an early glimpse of old age, when all your old friends keel over and soon there’s no one left who breathed the same air as you or laughed at the same jokes.

Perhaps that’s why we can’t quite bring ourselves to throw this year’s cards away, at least not just yet. Find a rubber band, and into the tinsel box they go. You can sense the tinsel isn’t impressed. And the tree baubles are positively enraged.