SEASON’S GREETINGS

After more than two decades liv­ing here, my fam­ily and I have man­aged to come to an ac­com­mo­da­tion with most as­pects of Eng­lish cul­ture in our Cata­lan lives. With Hal­loween, for ex­am­ple, my kids were at the right age to enjoy the fes­ti­val just as Cat­alo­nia began to adopt it, mean­ing we could cel­e­brate it with­out being the weird fam­ily down the road who dress up as Drac­ula or Franken­stein every year (the lo­cals think we’re weird for other rea­sons).

Food is an­other as­pect that no longer causes us as many prob­lems as it did back in the day. I re­mem­ber when I first got here, every vis­i­tor from the UK would come laden with Mar­mite. I abhor Mar­mite but I was al­ways too scared of of­fend­ing the gift giver (an Eng­lish trait I’ve now over­come) to tell them I’d rather eat dog food. Even my local su­per­mar­ket now sells Tet­ley tea bags, and my son came home re­cently cradling a bot­tle of black­cur­rant cor­dial, just like grandma used to give him on sum­mer trips over in Liv­er­pool.

Yet if there’s one thing after all these years that I still haven’t got my head around, it’s Christ­mas cards. To be hon­est, even when I lived in Eng­land I was far from con­vinced by the whole card-giv­ing dy­namic.

As a kid, I re­mem­ber that al­most every­one we knew would get a Christ­mas card from us, and not only fam­ily and friends, but also many neigh­bours, some shop­keep­ers, trades­men and teach­ers. And we would get a card back from every­one on our list, which was huge and the focus of much anx­i­ety in case – heaven for­bid – you missed some­one out but – oh, the shame – you then re­ceived a card from them! It’s not sur­pris­ing that there were three large greet­ing card shops on our local high street.

Now, move that whole op­er­a­tion to the other side of Eu­rope, to a coun­try that has lit­tle tra­di­tion of giv­ing greet­ing cards, and cer­tainly not on the scale of Eng­land, and put in charge of the Christ­mas card op­er­a­tion some­one with a ter­ri­ble mem­ory who has never re­ally seen the point and you have a recipe for dis­as­ter. And I have to admit that my han­dling of the Christ­mas card sit­u­a­tion has al­ways been dis­as­trous and today is all a bit of a mess.

Al­though I made a valiant ef­fort in the be­gin­ning, the dif­fi­culty in sourc­ing the cards, the un­re­li­able postal ser­vice, my in­abil­ity to plan far enough ahead, my habit of los­ing my list so I had to write it out anew every year but al­ways for­get­ting some­one, all meant that after a few years of roy­ally mess­ing up the Christ­mas card op­er­a­tion led me to the de­ci­sion that this was one Eng­lish tra­di­tion that I was not cut out for.

Over the years, I have os­cil­lated be­tween send­ing and not send­ing Christ­mas cards... but now I re­alise that is the worst thing you can do, be­cause if you drop off some­one’s list after fail­ing to send them a card for a few years, then the last thing they want is to sud­denly get a card from you out of the blue. Ei­ther you’re on the list or you’re not on the list, any­thing else is just chaos.

You often hear the ex­pres­sion “it’s the thought that counts” in con­nec­tion with Christ­mas cards. That may be the most im­por­tant thing in cer­tain cases, and greet­ing cards ob­vi­ously have a role to play when many friends and fam­ily live in an­other coun­try, but the most im­por­tant les­son I’ve learned where giv­ing Christ­mas cards is con­cerned, is that it’s a case of all or noth­ing.

Opin­ion