Toby Young: Nobody appreciates you sending Christmas cards of your children’s ‘art’

I’ve just had a massive row with Caroline about Christmas cards. We usually send about 120 and this year we’ve each ordered them from a different source — Caroline from the children’s primary in Shepherd’s Bush and me from the West London Free School. Our fight was about which batch to keep.

Caroline has sentiment on her side because the cards she wants to send out have been made by our children. It’s essentially a fund-raising ruse whereby the school gets each pupil to ‘design’ a Christmas card, i.e. put a few scribbles down on a piece of paper, then has them printed and sells them to parents at a massive mark-up. (I’ve paid for my cards too, incidentally, but they’re nothing like as expensive.)

Caroline thinks the people on our Christmas card list will enjoy getting our children’s cards because they’re ‘homemade’. I disagree. Yes, their grandparents will like them and, at a pinch, their aunts, uncles and cousins. But all 120 people on the list? In my experience, getting a Christmas card ‘designed’ by a child is always a bit embarrassing because of his or her conspicuous lack of artistic ability. It’s usually a reminder of the huge discrepancy between the parents’ estimation of their child’s ‘talent’ and everyone else’s. It’s one thing to stick their daubs up on the fridge, but another actually to send them to people. It’s like advertising the fact that you’re completely delusional about your child’s ‘gifts’.

The West London Free School card, by contrast, serves a number of useful purposes. As I pointed out to Caroline, it’s a reminder to our friends that the school exists and an option they might want to consider for their own children.