Simon Garfield recently published a book called To the Letter: A Journey Through a Vanishing World, which examines and celebrates the practice of letter writing and looks at some of the the great correspondences of our time. In an article for The Telegraph this week he has penned a love letter to the Christmas card, which he says is one of the last noble traditions of letter writing to fall (or at least to decline at a slower rate).
Garfield relates how the printed Christmas card was invented 170 years ago by Henry Cole, founder and director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and designed by John Callcott Horsley (see card above). He also shares an anecdote from 1948 of a man who would save money and confuse his friends with the cards sent to him: “The moment he receives a Christmas card he puts it in an envelope and posts it on to someone else. If the card has been inscribed by some affectionate hand ‘Love from Pamela’ or ‘With the compliments of Messrs Rickshawe, Court Hairdressers’, he does not trouble to erase these inscriptions. He merely adds the words ‘and Richard’. He contends that this method… gives added pleasure to his friends. Not only do they get their cards, but they are left wondering who Pamela may be.”
“Like many things under threat in a digital world, the Christmas card still has much to recommend it. There’s the rare delight of receiving something through the letterbox that isn’t in a brown envelope. There’s the pleasure of adorning a room with festive cheer on sagging string. And there’s the reassuring knowledge that one has not, after all, been struck off someone’s list,” Garfield writes.
Have you posted early for Christmas? Have you posted for Christmas at all? And did the experience make you feel in the least bit nostalgic?
I recently published a book about the history and pleasures of a dying art. As a regular emailer and texter, I was keen to celebrate something deeper and more enduring: the particular joy one experiences from receiving a letter and handwritten card in the post.
I looked at Seneca and Virginia Woolf and Ted Hughes, but predominantly I looked at us, and what we seem prepared to lose. Letter writing has been crucial to our economic and emotional well-being since Ancient Greece, but the practice has been evaporating for two decades, and in two more the licking of a stamp will seem as antiquated as the horse-drawn carriage.
Book details
- To the Letter: A Journey Through a Vanishing World by Simon Garfield
EAN: 9780857868589
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Image courtesy The Telegraph