Why send Christmas cards?

by Richard Pooley

The Danes have led the way, as so often these days. From 1 January, 2026 the national postal service, PostNord, will stop collecting and delivering letters. Their red post boxes have been disappearing fast, reflecting the 90% decline in the number of letters posted over the past twenty-five years. I thought about this as I fought to get ten Christmas cards destined for abroad into a British post box late last Sunday night. I hope the postie managed to catch the avalanche on opening it at 8 a.m. on Monday. One of the letters was to Søren and Marianne in Denmark. They’ll get it this year, though the UK postal system is so dismal even sending it seventeen days before Christmas for £3.40 does not guarantee its arrival in that time. Søren will probably ask me why the late Queen's head is on the stamp when she died over 3 years ago. I asked the same question of the post office woman who was unable to explain why the self-service machine was taking over five minutes to spit out sixteen 'worldwide' stamps. She didn't know. I don't think it will be long before Royal Mail will follow PostNord's lead.

Why do my wife and I, and evidently our neighbours, still send Christmas cards? My children, now 39 and 36, thought it a quaint thing for us to do when, as teenagers, they could use email, Myspace and Facebook. Today, our doing this is incomprehensible to them. Why spend £88 on cards and stamps – the damage this year -  and several hours of time during one of the busiest periods of the year writing a few scribbled lines (at best) on 58 individual cards when you could send one electronic message full of your news to all of them at no cost and in very little time?

Because we always have done? Yes. Tradition is not to be scoffed at. Because we find email too impersonal? Yes. And because we hardly use social media. Sure it would be easy to choose a Jacquie Lawson ecard and personalise it with a newsy message for all. And it’s fun receiving them. But it’s yet another thing on my phone. I’d prefer to have something to put on the mantelpiece. Yes, I’m that old and old-fashioned.

When to send? At least three weeks before Christmas for those going abroad, unless they are for France where New Year cards are the norm or Japan where Christmas is meaningless to 99% of the population (the 1% are nearly all in or around Nagasaki). Japanese Christmas ‘traditions’ include couples having romantic dinners on Christmas Eve and eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and strawberry shortcake on 25 December (a tradition dating from a successful KFC marketing campaign in the early 1970s).  For everywhere else, send them early and harvest more (“Damn, Richard’s sent me a card; I’d better send him one.”).

Where to send? "Not to Johannesburg", says friend Sandy: “Post does not work here, Scan a copy of whatever it is and email.” Sigh. Not to Zambia either. One friend there sent us a photo of our card when it arrived. In April. Our success rate in the USA is not great: cards have been returned (oh yes, remember to put your name and address on the back for dodgy places such as America). Trump is right to call the USPS “a joke”.

What to send? We have drifted into linocut prints of birds, hares and wintry landscapes. You know, the A-List Women: Angela Harding, Annie Soudain, Angie Lewin. I used to be less lazy and go for a wider range: Pieter Brueghel the Elder paintings and Japanese woodcut prints for the secular, Madonna and Child images for the devout. Charity cards all, of course. For a long time we eschewed the newsletter, preferring to scribble variations on a central Pooleyworld news theme. Better that than the typed screeds boasting the brilliance of multiple children we had never met and listing the exotic places visited during the year. But that was very Eighties. I noticed a switch to self-deprecation and interesting observations on local cultures and decided to follow suit. It helped that we were reporting on life in Japan at the time. More recently I have drafted a brief, factual, typed update (dull), had it edited by my wife (duller), and then written a few bon mots whose mots are both indecipherable and mauvais. Humour? I leave that to such long-running practitioners as fellow Only Connect writer, Eric.

Who to send to? Ah, there’s the rub. For years I agonised over this. To family, of course. To those I had not seen all year or indeed for many years, especially if they were in another country from the one we were living in. To people I had recently met? Yes but only if I really liked them and, much more importantly, thought they might like me. This was a big problem. As a management trainer I met tens of fascinating business people from around the world every year… and hundreds of unfascinating ones too. Guess what? Several of the latter sent me cards but only a few of the former. Another Life Lesson there. Since coming back from France to the UK in late 2018, the rule has been simple: If they sent us a card/ecard/email/text last Christmas, we’ll send them a card this. We’re down to 58 this year.

The most cards we sent was in 2004. 105 of them to some 180 people (not counting children). How do I know? Because since 1980 I have kept a record of who I have sent cards to and who I have had cards from. Nerdy? Yes. Boring? Never. Who are all these people I knew and liked well enough to send them a card forty-five years ago of whom I know nothing now? Quite a few are dead. Of those twenty-seven with a surname beginning with B listed in 1980 (B’s, C’s, S’s and T’s are the most common), six may have discovered that Christmas is not one big con after all. Of the remaining twenty-one I have no clue whether five are still alive.

What on Earth persuaded the Saudi Embassy in London to send me a Christmas card in 1983? What was so wonderful about that group from Elf Aquitaine Norge that I noted down five Norwegian names when they sent me a card in 1986? Why was I so stupid as to lose touch with Clive, the lepidopterist and property developer with whom I travelled along the Kenya coast in the late seventies and whose car – a converted London taxi - I inadvertently damaged (well, I was very drunk) the following year. The man set up Butterfly World and has butterfly farms in Belize and Florida. Opportunities missed. Why am I no longer communicating with Aniela, the beautiful Pole who pretended love as a means to get a UK visa in the mid-Seventies but by 1980 was sending me Christmas cards together with her new British husband, Chris?

The record has proved useful in bringing me back together with old friends, especially female ones whose surnames have changed on marriage. Sandy in Johannesburg introduced me by email to Jill in Bath three years ago. Jill had told her that, in fact, she knew me. I said “Er…sorry, I don't think so.” Then she told me her maiden name. I looked at the Christmas card record. Oh yes. I exchanged cards with her in 1980 (and before that date, she later told me). My wife and I are having dinner with her next Tuesday.

And only last week did I spot that Christopher, who moved with his wife into my street recently and who I discovered was my step-grandmother’s favourite godson, had sent me a Christmas card in 1999 when he was working for the European Bank of Reconstruction & Development. I have yet to ask him why.

Michael and Michelle (he had been a flatmate in the early 80s) I have not seen since our wedding in 1985. Yet we have exchanged cards ever since, apart from 2013 when I sent them one but received nothing back. I had forgotten to tell them we had moved to France. So, in 2014 no card went or came. In 2015, we did not send but did receive. Shamed into action, I resumed normal service in 2016.

If Søren and Marianne in Denmark post a card to us this year, I’ll send them one next year. But PostNord will no longer deliver it. Will they be bothered to go down to the nearest branch of dao, a private company who already deal with 25% of letters in Denmark (and who insist on using lower-case lettering for their name), and collect it? I do hope so.

Merry Christmas!