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Saturday 22 November 2008

Status anxiety

What your Christmas card says about you (and it’s not usually very nice)

Toby Young frets about his Christmas card

The same is true of Christmas cards. Normally, members of the British aristocracy are fairly reserved when it comes to advertising their privileged status. Indeed, a reluctance to draw attention to your advantages is supposed to be a hallmark of good breeding. However, no such reticence applies when it comes to Christmas cards. A typical missive will feature a patchwork of photographs of the children, each engaging in a high-status pursuit. There’s 11-year-old Tarquin about to bag himself a brace of pheasant, and there’s little India at Val d’Isère. Typically, the card will include one shot of the entire family — and there are never less than four children — standing in front of some ancestral pile. You might as well write ‘We Are Posher Than You’ on the envelope and have done with it.

What accounts for this lapse in judgment? If these same people received a card from Donald Trump with a picture of him standing next to his private Boeing 727, they’d be the first to wrinkle their noses. Perhaps the reason it doesn’t occur to them that there’s anything vulgar about their behaviour is that it’s an annual ritual. They tell themselves that their friends and relatives will actually want to see recent pictures of their children — and these photographs, which look as though they’ve been lifted straight out of the Boden catalogue, just happen to be lying around. One thing’s for sure: successful individuals never have to search very hard for a pretext to tell you how well they’re doing.

This year, I suggested to my wife that we produce a parody of the upper-class Christmas card. Under the words ‘Greetings From Shepherd’s Bush’, I wanted to include pictures of our children in various urban poses. Four-year-old Sasha would be brandishing a handgun outside Nando’s on the Uxbridge Road, while two-year-old Ludo would be about to slice through a bicycle lock with a pair of bolt-cutters. The centrepiece would be the entire family standing outside our 20th-century terrace house in matching shell suits.

Not surprisingly, Caroline didn’t think this was a good idea. Instead, she and the children spent several weeks producing over 200 handmade cards. My job was to address the envelopes and write the greeting — or, at least, it was until she discovered that I was scrupulously avoiding any explicitly Christian messages, a hangover from the years I spent living in New York. To demonstrate just how absurd this was she ripped open the envelope containing the card for our local vicar and, sure enough, it included the phrase ‘happy holidays’. ‘I hardly think he’s going to be offended if you wish him a happy Christmas,’ she said.

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