The Christmas round-robin letter is a dying art. We’ll miss them when they’re gone

Christmas is a time when people indulge their guilty pleasures. For some, it’s cheese and chocolates, or the inexorable viewing of Mrs Brown’s Boys. For others, the catharsis of a blazing family row. Sadly mine has proved harder to indulge this year. That is, the tradition of the Christmas round-robin letter – those missives which go one step further than “saying the quiet bit out loud” and instead seek to commit to paper the pettiest achievements of a year for the amusement and mortification of family, friends and anyone else unfortunate enough to be on the Christmas card list.

I devour these little insights into people’s lack of inner voice; the banal detail, the boastfulness, the seemingly never-ending supply of new grandchildren and career success. A particular highlight is the humblebrag holiday – e.g. “for our fourth ‘abroad’ trip this year, we enjoyed a weekend break in Samarkand”. There is an art to the Christmas robin-round that, when done properly, is hard to beat. They spark joy by providing an external source of venom during the Christmas period. How many internal family squabbles have been avoided by the unity of the common ghastliness of a particularly egregious circular letter?

We didn’t get so many this year, however. There are perhaps multiple reasons for this decline. Certainly the recent performance of the Royal Mail doesn’t inspire hope. If some Christmas cards aren’t being delivered until February, it’s entirely possible that the details of Gus’s glittering career in the university Korfball team and Emily’s A-Level Latin prize still await us at a sorting office in Luton.

Society being locked inside for three years during the Covid period didn’t help either, making the quality of material necessarily more restricted (“enjoyed our luxurious long weekend corpsed out in the living room” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it). The smug circular, like the economy, has never fully recovered from the ravages of lockdown. Or have they simply been mocked and pilloried to death? Has the weight of parody now become such that even for those who write them, a sense of self-awareness has crept in?

Perhaps my amusement with them is because a round-robin from my family would be so profoundly un-festive – and because they require effort which is not something I associate with our household. Take our approach to Christmas wrapping. My brother and I normally do most of ours on Christmas Eve, somewhere between the third G&T and Midnight Mass. Dad forgoes presents and deals only in paper money. He’ll go to the bank and take out a small bundle of cash, handing out notes at random to relatives throughout the day in the style of Don Vito Corleone.

Mum ingeniously avoids wrapping by shoving presents into oversized shopping bags – one per person – which she’ll take back when you’ve opened them. Why bother, she reasons, when ultimately it all ends up in the bin. It reminds me of Homer Simpson’s comeback to Marge, when she begs him to take her on a proper date rather than spending another night in front of the TV; “What’s the point of going out? We’re just gonna wind up back here anyway.”

Still, I hope our family’s approach isn’t adopted more generally, lest the Christmas round-robin is killed by an avalanche of apathy. After all, as Mr Bennet says in Pride and Prejudice. “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”

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