Goodbye to Christmas Cards (2018)
At the zenith of the process, we were sending nearly 250 Christmas cards every year, sometimes even accompanied by a circular letter; but the letter is long gone and the Christmas Card list is now hovering around 100. Not that we have resorted to the email Christmas card to cut down on the paper, it is just that we began by ceasing to send cards to people we meet every day and then we began to look at the difference between friendship and duty and, as the result of that, we stopped sending cards to work and former work colleagues.
And although I understand the decline, I regret it because I have always enjoyed the ritual of hanging cards as part of our Christmas decorations; and at the end of the season we always examine the cards and promise to meet at least half a dozen people in the coming year that we have not seen sometimes for decades.
But my sentiment is a small thing: we have never been so well connected with each other through email and those whom we meet daily know how much we love them; or not.
The problem is how to bring our friends into the room during our celebrations. It will take a bit of time but I think we should put pictures of our friends and their electronic messages into one of those digital photo frames so that they can flash up at random. My mother loves the photo frame of her children, so this is a workable idea.