The designer of the first mass-produced Christmas card sent it to 1,000 people, including his grandmother. It featured a drawing of a family toasting the cardholder below a utilitarian “TO:____.” The card was conceived as a time hack — personal correspondence had become a growth sector, powered by the advent of cheap postage, and Victorian Londoners expected their season’s greetings to be answered. Why not Reply All?
The illustration was a nice touch. The card’s creator, Sir Henry Cole, commissioned a friend to sketch the scene in his head; the family he envisioned looks happy and wealthy and possibly fun. (A little girl in the foreground downs a glass of wine that her mom appears to wrest away.) More than 150 years later, people still want to project a version of that rich domesticity. Americans post 1.6 billion holiday cards a year; the personalized greetings and generic warm wishes haven’t changed, but now the family pictures are real.
My parents belong to a community of lapsed Protestants who observe Sundays at the club, so of course they took Christmas cards seriously when I was a kid. We sent them nearly every year, and inbound cards piled up in return, which we kept in a small basket flown in from another room. I’d park myself on the couch and peruse them one by one, picking out familiar faces among a sea of button downs, white jeans and grassy dunes. The choreography of a Christmas card picture is an extended negotiation. Everyone is on their best behavior for as long as they can stand it. Everyone is mindful of decorum. Though rarely pleasant, there’s an esprit de corps about the Christmas card: You’re doing it for the unit. It’s your classy family against the world.
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This is not a friendly environment for interlopers. Romantic partners tend to flit in and out of the family record, making cheery (or cheugy) cameos in our albums and Instagram feeds, reminding us who we were and holding us to account. But holiday cards invite a level of scrutiny that candids rarely do. Senior family titleholders might respond to the pressure by keeping a tight grip on the reins — proposing to snap a few pics of “just us” before beckoning to your college lover of six months. Just so there’s some optionality when it’s gametime.
Naturally, outsiders become insiders. People get married, they have kids, they scale up. They may or may not spin off their own holiday card properties. (Opinions vary on the industry’s long-term viability, but millennials do enjoy touching real mail.) Once you cross that velvet rope into the cards of your in-laws, the practice seems newly inviting — legitimating, even. A Christmas card seen by a hundred acquaintances is far more tangible than a marriage certificate on file at the county courthouse. It’s a formal registry that makes family ties more legible. And it updates year after year. Which raises a question: What happens when those ties break?
Last month, over Thanksgiving weekend, extended families got together and collectively fired up the Christmas card machine. All the usual suspects were there — except the ones who weren’t. The ones whose absence portends a more permanent change: a relocation, or dissolution, or divorce, or something more tragic. Eventually, family hardships have to be said out loud. But sometimes a Christmas card states them more loudly than we’d like.
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This is the power and the anachronism of the Christmas card, which scratches an itch that iPhones should have cured by now. After all, self-portraits are a devalued commodity. Roughly 85 percent of the world controls the means of selfie production. It costs nothing to share a family photo with friends, neighbors and the internet. But even as we generate endless portraits for external consumption, our identities tend to coalesce around a few key images. They pop up not just in social feeds but on dating apps, Zoom meetings, ride-share trips and digital super accounts that unlock by asking, in effect, “This you?” The world largely encounters us as avatars, profile pics, professional headshots — atomized units in some unfathomably large database. Portraits that indicate we belong to a bigger system.
Christmas cards take us off those servers and put us back on Earth, back into the only system that ever really mattered, composed of the only people who truly fix us in time and space. Obviously, our relationships to those people will change. Christmas cards have no forecasting abilities; they’re just another totem, like wedding bands or monogrammed towels. They make no promises and they are rewritten every year. One way or another, their subjects come and go. As a snapshot of family, the Christmas card is ephemeral. But we can take pride in its simple, unassailable message: “This was us at our best.”
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