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The surprising resilience of Christmas cards
‘They remain a curious, fleeting form of uninvited interior decoration. We have no power over the tastes they express.’
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What is fascinating is that Christmas cards were – and still are – accepted with democratic abandon, says the writer.
PHOTO: UNSPLASH
Edwin Heathcote
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Look at the tasteful designs for any Christmas interior, the style inspirations and the chichi magazine spreads, and you will find foraged twigs, swags of green, berries, candles, logs and lanterns. What you almost certainly will not see is crowds of Christmas cards. That is despite their surprising survival and ubiquity, and despite the compunction we feel when we receive them to display them – a compunction compounded, perhaps, by the increasing rarity of tangible objects of communication.
Quite remarkably, many people still send and receive Christmas cards. But if they are absent from those scenes of domestic perfection, how are we supposed to know what to do with them?
