Christmas Cards
I am thoughtful, sentimental and 'on top of things'.
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Every year I buy a box of about 20 Christmas cards, and every year I don’t send out a single one.
I want to be a card sender. I want to be thoughtful, and sentimental, and on top of things, but I just don’t seem to have it in me right now. It’s weird that I can’t manage it. I guess the reason is, by the time I’ve actually figured out who I want to send a card to, realising just how many additional, irritating steps there are to see through the vision becomes overwhelming and I just give up on it. For example, you have to write the thing, which isn’t always as easy as it sounds, because depending on who you’re sending it to, you don’t want to undersell how much your friendship means to you. It’s going to be immortalised in ink, for god's sake - it has to be right. It’s hard to express how you truly feel about a person you care about within the confines of an A6 piece of card, and more often than not - I fail to do it. So sometimes it feels like it’s better to just let those things go unsaid until I actually see that person… in person. I’m fine with in-person.
If, on the off chance I do manage to sum up my feelings accurately, then there’s still the logistics of posting the card. Stamps are really expensive. I get why they are, it’s not like you’re paying for their physicality - if you were, it’d be a worse deal than the card itself. Of course, you’re paying for the labour that goes into the process of sending that card across to another part of the country, but even with all that in mind (or, especially with all that in mind) it’s challenging not to become overwhelmed by just how big of a waste of time it all is. Like, we’re gonna employ these people to physically take this card from here to there, using vehicles and petrol? Forget it.
Christmas cards made sense when you were in primary school. You’d design one yourself, using glue and glitter and you’d write a few to the classmates you got on with or fancied, or you’d do a rude one to that nasty little bitch Bianca, and you’d pop them securely into a little handmade, shoe-box post-box, and the furthest they had to travel was often to another classroom about 10 feet away. That’s what Christmas cards are for. For whatever strange reason, we’ve elected to keep that pointless tradition going into our adulthoods, and what’s worse we don’t even bother to make the cards ourselves. In fact, if you did go to the effort of making a card from scratch, using PVA glue and glitter and bits of pasta, and you gave that to a friend or family member, they’d likely have you sectioned - like that isn’t a completely normal and sweet thing to do. Oh, I’m sorry I tried to bring you bespoke joy this season.
So, as a result, I have a shitload of unused blank Christmas cards in a box under my bed, all tracing back years that I’ll most probably never ever send to anyone. And, because it seems to be nostalgically burned into my psyche now, I’ll no doubt go ahead and buy another new box of blank Christmas cards next year, telling myself that this year will be the year that I manage to be a thoughtful, sentimental and ‘on top of things’ adult.
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