My husband is bemused by our tradition of sending Christmas cards. He doesn't see the point. Where he comes from, no-one, or no-one he knows, sends Christmas or any other cards. No birthday, engagement, wedding, new home, get well or sympathy cards. No Mother's Day or Father's Day cards.
Aside from occasions common to us all, they have different celebrations anyway. Eid replaces Christmas in significance. Baptisms are marked by the formal sacrifice of a lamb and male circumcision is something else entirely. In his country, people visit regularly and bring gifts to events to which they are invited. If they live far away, they phone. Their joys and griefs are deeply emotional and powerfully expressed. But to mark these occasions with cards? In houses without mantelpieces, where would you actually display them?
So he rather scorns the exercise, the expense and time it takes to despatch. You don't have to remind friends you see all the time that you're thinking of them. As for friends you don't see from one year's end to the next, do they really care about you? Do you really care about them?
I tell him I do care actually and hope the feeling is mutual. Cards add to the festive atmosphere and if you're spending a bleak midwinter on your own it's nice to know that old friends do think about you, even if only once a year. Promises to renew acquaintance may be sincerely meant at the time, but not always easy to fulfil in practice. Time passes. The demands of work, of raising young families or caring for elderly relatives intervene. People move too far away to visit frequently. Illness, age and distance diminish mobility. So friendships dwindle and eventually some friends die.
Friends' children are adorable at first, stumbling around on their faltering feet, muddling and mispronouncing words, charming and entertaining, despite occasional, sometimes frequent, ear-splitting yells, which you forgive, because of their parents and you know they will grow out of it. But when they become teenagers, they withdraw, viewing you from a distance, puzzled how you ever fitted into their parents' lives, unsure how to regard you or what to say. Then they become adult, fall in love, marry and have children of their own, meaning your friends seem always on-call as grandparents.
E-cards are less expensive, cause less hassle to send, but they don't brighten a room. Virtuous friends make you feel guilty for not opting to give the money to charity instead. Mind you, they never ask you which charity you might like the value of your card to be donated to. But let me not be churlish.
All of that is before you factor in a pandemic or young people finding their inner Greta Thunberg. Glitter, they tell me, is unrecyclable. Not that I'm dazzled by cheap bling. For me, Christmas cards are a reminder of the various phases of my life: where I've been, whom I've known and the memories of the happy times together we once shared. So how did it all start, this Christmas card tradition? I assumed Prince Albert had a lot to do with it. So I went online to find out.
I wasn't far wrong. It seems the prime motivator was a certain Henry Cole (1808-1882), an indefatigable, well-connected civil servant, inventor and entrepreneur, interested in public record and postal reform, whose involvement in the Great Exhibition of 1851 led to the establishment of what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington and, in 1875, a knighthood. Working with Sir Rowland Hill, he played a key role in introducing the Penny Post and may have been involved in designing the Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp. In 1843, he commissioned the very first Christmas card.
The man he commissioned to design it was John Calcott Horsley (1817-1903). Horsley was an artist, influenced by the Dutch painters, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer. Punch nicknamed him 'J C(lothes) Horsley' because he was implacably opposed to the then trendy fashion of using nude models. He, too, was interested in postal reform and designed the pre-paid 'Horsley envelope', which preceded the postage stamp.
The card, which can be viewed online, was designed as a triptych. In the centre, a Dickensian bourgeois family raise their glasses at dinner in a toast to Christmas – totally annoying the Temperance Society. There are small children present, maybe even imbibing, although the image isn't clear. Two side panels remind you of the moral virtues of feeding the poor and clothing the naked. The whole is interspersed with images of holly (symbolising chastity) and ivy (a place where God has walked, apparently).
Cole ordered 1,000 copies of the card. When he had taken what he wanted for himself he sold off the rest at sixpence each, which made it a luxury item in the mid-19th century, beyond the reach of any ordinary working-class family. Very few remain, but in 2001 one of them, which he had sent to his grandmother in 1843, sold at auction for £22,500.
Later in life, he was nicknamed 'Old King Cole'. There are many images of him. The magazine,
Vanity Fair, published a pleasant, whiskered, slightly corpulent cartoon of him wearing check trousers, and the American artist, James McNeill Whistler, was painting his portrait when he died somewhat suddenly. The portrait was never finished and is thought to have been destroyed. His lengthy obituary in the
London Times concluded that he had led 'an active, beneficent and well-spent life', though not without controversy.
With Covid variants still playing games, we don't know how this Christmas is going to turn out, but, if you've got this far, I wish a very happy one to all of you.
Gillean Somerville-Arjat is a writer and critic based in Edinburgh
