My brother (a man of strong feelings about a quirky assortment of subjects) holds similar sentiments about Christmas cards. He considers the whole thing a cynical commercial racket on the part of the card manufacturers and the postal services; plus, he sees the sending-them custom as a mechanistic and tending-to-the-insincere gesture towards friendly / affectionate contact. He doesn't send cards, and most people of his acquaintance know not to send them to him; if he does get a card from anyone, he -- reluctantly -- reciprocates. What really gets his goat is when someone writes in a card: just their names, and maybe "best wishes" or whatever: this strikes him as this whole scene's very lowest depths of meaningless automatism. He'll grudgingly forgive card-sending if the sender writes in some sort of message, no matter how brief and / or fatuous -- it can just be something like "the cat's got the measles, but the dogs are doing fine"; but "just the names, no message", essentially offends him.
I reckon that I can see where people are coming from with these feelings re this matter -- my own sentiment is that it's perhaps more gracious and charitable not to metaphorically spit on someone's attempted gesture of goodwill, however feeble / clueless; but perhaps here, I'm wetly acquiescent towards stuff which has little, if anything, to commend it.
Yes, the cards with a minimal or non-existent message, or even our name omitted, are the most pointless. I do actually like cards when they serve as a momento of people we enjoyed meeting briefly who we couldn't realistically keep in touch with. It's just that, for only the 3rd time in my life, I am avoiding cards as a symbolic way of ignoring Christmas. The lack of pressure to get them written is a relief.
Another tradition I don't like is when people eat and eat and eat all Christmas Day. As well as a 3 course lunch, or more like 5 or 6 once you include second helpings, they have cakes and even supper at the end of it. Although I take care how much I consume, I still end up having more food than any other day of the year, partly because saying
Yes a little please is more polite than saying
no. Even before the lockdown restrictions, and arranging to work on Christmas Day, I was hoping to avoid a communal Christmas Day so that, for the first time in a while, i would not feel bloated on Boxing Day.
Then, given that there are the 12 days of Christmas, it beats me why do people leave decorations up for more like 24 days in the end!
