Season’s greetings

My recollections of Christmas Past are dominated by the fabrication of the family card. It was one of my father’s principles that Christmas was a family event and that any cards sent out should be created within the family. It was quite wrong to buy one. Happily he was an artist of the old-fashioned sort, skilled at all the various methods of reproduction — etching and drypoint, engraving, photogravure, lithography and various abstruse methods of printmaking. Indeed he taught them at his art school. Lithography was his favourite because it had a softness and fidelity to nature and avoided the harsh line of the other reproductive processes.

We sent out around 150 cards each year, and by the end of November my father had drawn the master card on the stone. This was almost invariably a version of the crib scene, always in black and white, and had to be painted. Watercolour was applied by hand, and thus done by one of my two sisters, Clare and Elfride. From the age of five, I was allowed to help, under close supervision. Various bits of the design had to be done in gold or silver, and this was difficult work I was not allowed to do. The whole house was turned upside down during this process, and resembled a monastic scriptorium in the Middle Ages, with intent figures bent over their work, surrounded by pots of paint and cards in various stages of completion. All had to be finished for 17 December, when the cards were put into their envelopes and addressed, then carried in triumph to the big red postbox near the clock tower of the park, regarded as a ‘safe’ postbox. These cards, when complete, were real works of art, and I wonder if any have survived. The recipients must be long dead.