I have been manufacturing our Christmas card.
You can see the production line in the attached photograph.
I had managed to get most of my ideas into the computer during this week, but when I came to putting the finishing touches to it and getting it all printed out today, I couldn’t help but feel that no Christmas card is complete without some sort of badly-written poetry inside it. My personal preference for stuff to find inside a Christmas card would be for a tenner, but since we don’t have any of those spare for sticking in cards, the poetry was the next best thing.
Hence I started the day looking at other people’s Christmas card websites.
I found one that provided personalised Christmas cards, the sort that come with your name and a nauseating message that you hope very much the sender does not really mean.
They were not cheap. Rarely have I been so astonished by the drivel that people are prepared to spend a fiver on dispatching.
I have discovered how very convenient it is for the greeting card industry that ‘smiles’ can be rhymed with ‘miles’. Also I was unspeakably revolted to discover one card which purported to have been sent from an unborn baby to its parents and which expressed its contentment in the fortunately paired bit of doggerel which ended in ‘Mummy’.
Surely, surely, nobody could possibly stray so far from the boundaries of acceptable sentiments as to waste £4.95 plus postage on such appalling nonsense.
Evidently they do.
I considered all of this and set to composing my own poetry. This is more difficult than you might think, and Wordsworth has definitely gone up in my estimation. Well a bit, anyway, although I still think his lonely as a cloud metaphor is rubbish, there is nothing lonely about clouds in the Lake District.
In the end there wasn’t room for a poem in the already completely overcrowded card anyway, so I put it on the back and I expect half of the recipients will never notice it at all.
This is probably just as well.
I was done then, and could start to print them out.
I have got to stick my tongue out to do this. You have got to think very carefully which way up to put everything in order to get things to print the right way up and in the right place so that you do not finish up with a Christmas card which has the writing upside down.
After a few trial runs and some swearing and a bin full of rejects, I got it sorted, and it went fairly swimmingly after that.
Obviously the next step was to splurge glue and glitter all over them. This had to be a bit minimal because I was starting to be in a hurry by then, and also when I got to the glue bottle it was almost empty. I was sorry about this, because I like glitter, and I know that it is going out of fashion now. I think this is quite right, because of the poor turtles, but I still like it and will miss it when it becomes too wicked to use.
Mark usually folds them, because this is harder than it looks, and you have got to be very precise. I did everything that he does but they kept slipping about. I thought I had managed quite well, but when I looked it turned out that I hadn’t. Indeed, I had managed to mess some of them up completely, so if you get a card that will not stand up at all you will have to peg it to a washing line, or something, which was what my grandmother used to do with her Christmas cards.
They had to be written after that, and I realised to my horror that I had missed the last posting date for everybody in other countries by ages and ages. I had been so busy thinking about making cards that I had quite forgotten about getting them in the post.
I sent them anyway, they will do for Easter if you scrape off the glitter.
It took two trips to the post office and a vast sum of cash. When I shoved them into the post box I had to push them upwards, because the pile of mail had already reached the height of the letter slot.
It was pouring with rain, and I had to wait a long time in the queue. I had to put my scarf in the washing machine afterwards, because of making the terrible discovery, whilst shivering miserably outside the socially-distanced doorway, that I had forgotten my handkerchief.
It was an awful moment. Sometimes I despair of becoming acceptably middle class.
Anyway, it is done.
The cards are almost all posted.
I am truly dis-carded.
