The Christmas card season is upon us. We've had four, and haven't sent any yet. Two of the four were handed to me at last Saturday's party by friends who planned ahead and saved on stamps. One was from our hosts, who knew we were coming, and the other from somebody who presumably took a view that we would be going. I am always very cautious and cowardly about asking anybody whether they are going to anything, in case they haven't been invited, but if we hadn't been there I suppose she'd have taken it home again.
The other two cards arrived in this morning's post, one all the way from El Paso, Texas. It makes me think I must get organised and start writing ours. I have bought them, ignoring the annual article from a journalist casting around for a Christmas related topic arguing that in the age of texts and Skype we don't need to go on sending each other tacky pieces of cardboard. If he has friends who send him tacky cards that's his problem, but some of us know people with better taste. And you can't put a row of text messages on the mantel piece. I like Christmas cards.
They're not without their complications, though. I am now four fifths of the way through In Search of Lost Time, and Proust has still not turned his attention to the matter of sending and receiving Christmas cards, but if he had done he'd have had a field day. Never mind the outrageous cost of stamps, the semiotics of who gets one and why is as complex as anything that happens at one of his minutely dissected social gatherings.
Family are fairly easy. Blood relatives and their spouses get a card, even if you only see each other at weddings, funerals and major anniversaries. Adult nephews and nieces complicate matters once they move out of the parental home, since they never think of telling their ancient uncle and aunt their current address. When they've only just flown the nest and are probably returning to their childhood home for Christmas you can get away with including them on the family card as per previous years, but once you know they've bought a house, let alone got married, they count as a fully fledged independent domestic unit and ought to get their own card, if only you knew where to send it.
Close friends are easy. They get a card, end of. Ditto the neighbours if you have managed to find out their names and irrespective of whether you socialise during the year. That's just diplomacy. And when I worked for a small family firm the unspoken rule was that everybody gave everyone a card, even the ones who hated each other. It's when you get to the rest of your friends and acquaintances that the fun and games start.
If I were of the Facebook generation, or at least one of the middle aged people who went on Facebook even though it wasn't really meant for them, I would be used to the whole business of friending and unfriending. If I spoke German or French I could agonise about the point at which I switched to addressing somebody as Du or Tu, though I dare say that nowadays everyone except doctor's receptionists adopts the intimate form at the outset. But the English language lacks such niceties and I'm not on Facebook, so deciding when to add someone to the Christmas card list, or delete them, is the nearest I get, my once a year chance to decide which of the people I've met through clubs or societies have by now become personal friends. At one level it is only a piece of coloured cardboard, but at another it is a social signal. You only want to signal the offer of friendship to people who want to be friends, otherwise it's embarrassing at a deeper level than their failure to send you some coloured cardboard.
Then there are the people you used to see a lot, and now never hear from. After you have become exhausted with the effort of trying to revive the friendship do you still send a Christmas card and defer the issue for another year, or do you stop? Hope they blink and stop first? And the cards from people you weren't expecting a card from, that arrive so close to Christmas that you can't send one back. Should you send one anyway? Maybe scuff the envelope so that it looks as though it had spent days mislaid in the postal system, but that is just sad and devious. When somebody dies and you didn't know their partner very well, for how many years do you go on sending cards to them if you used to send them a card as a couple? What should you do about your partner's old school friends or colleagues whose partners keep sending you both a card, even though you know your respective spouses haven't bothered to meet up for years?
Of course you can avoid the whole problem by not sending cards, which could be the Facebook generation's solution, or at the other extreme sending cards to everybody you have ever known, regardless. After our neighbour's wife died, and about twenty years after we had moved into what used to be his house, I stopped taking cards round for him that were still addressed here, especially if they were addressed to his wife as well. I thought that if someone didn't know after two decades that he had moved, or that his wife had died, he probably didn't need to hear from them.
Anyway, if you get a card from us you will know that deep thought has gone into it.
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