What your Christmas card says about you (and it's not usually very nice)
TOBY YOUNG When a person does something to remind you of their superior status, I often wonder whether he or she is fully in control of what they're doing. Namedroppers, for instance, often seem to be acting compulsively, as if they're suffering from a mild personality disorder. Once the impulse to drop the name has been triggered — usually by some circuitous route that only makes sense to the name-dropper — these people can't stop themselves. The name pops out in spite of the fact that they know it's gauche. (That's my excuse, anyway.) The same is true of Christmas cards. Normally, members of the British aristocracy are fairly reserved when it comes to advertising their privileged status. Indeed, a reluctance to draw attention to your advantages is supposed to be a hallmark of good breeding. However, no such reticence applies when it comes to Christmas cards. A typical missive will feature a patchwork of photographs of the children, each engaging in a high-status pursuit. There's 11-year-old Tarquin about to bag himself a brace of pheasant, and there's little India at Val d'Isere. Typically, the card will include one shot of the entire family — and there are never less than four children — standing in front of some ancestral pile. You might as well write We Are Posher Than You' on the envelope and have done with it.
What accounts for this lapse in judgment? If these same people received a card from Donald Trump with a picture of him standing next to his private Boeing 727, they'd be the first to wrinlde their noses. Perhaps the reason it doesn't occur to them that there's anything vulgar about their behaviour is that it's an annual ritual. They tell themselves that their friends and relatives will actually want to see recent pictures of their children — and these photographs, which look as though they've been lifted straight out of the Boden catalogue, just happen to be lying around. One things for sure: successful individuals never have to search very hard for a pretext to tell you how well they're doing.
This year, I suggested to my wife that we produce a parody of the upper-class Christmas card. Under the words 'Greetings From Shepherd's Bush', I wanted to include pictures of our children in various urban poses. Fouryear-old Sasha would be brandishing a handgun outside Nando's on the Uxbridge Road, while two-year-old Ludo would be about to slice through a bicycle lock with a pair of bolt-cutters. The centrepiece would be the entire family standing outside our 20th-century terrace house in matching shell suits.
Not surprisingly, Caroline didn't think this was a good idea. Instead, she and the children spent several weeks producing over 200 handmade cards. My job was to address the envelopes and write the greeting — or, at least, it was until she discovered that I was scrupulously avoiding any explicitly Christian messages, a hangover from the years I spent living in New York. To demonstrate just how absurd this was she ripped open the envelope containing the card for our local vicar and, sure enough, it included the phrase 'happy holidays'. 'I hardly think he's going to be offended if you wish him a happy Christmas,' she said.
Not that Caroline takes the whole business too seriously. Last week she read an article on the subject that claimed some people keep meticulous records of the cards they've sent and received each year: a red dot next to a person's name if they've reciprocated and a black dot if they haven't Two black dots in a row and they're struck off the list. 'Can you believe it?' she said. 'That's hardly the spirit of Christmas.'
I knitted my brow and shook my head — 'Unbelievable' — not daring to reveal that I keep similar records myself. Last year, for instance, we sent a grand total of 199 cards and received only 87 — a number that includes the one we got from our local Indian takeaway. It took a superhuman effort of will not to write a message at the foot of some cards warning the recipients that they were drinking in the lastchance saloon.
As far as I'm aware, our cards contained no telltale status indicators this year — but, then again, I probably wouldn't have realised if they had. Like those at the top of our society, I tend to give away more than I intend — only, in my case, it is to reveal just how inferior my status is. On some of the cards I wrote 'Printed on nonrecycled paper' — a joke that happens to be true. There's no connection between your social status and how green you are, is there?
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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