Let's not be beastly to the Postie

Rush hour in Lambourn…

Over a decade ago, I realised that buying an Injured Jockeys or other worthwhile charity Christmas card perhaps lacked meaning. The entire purpose of the Christmas Card was to ensure that the recipient [a] knew you weren't dead, [b] that, on a scale of 1-10 the recipients of your card are around the 5+ spot [c] that you cared enough to give some money to a Cause and [d] that you weren’t so lazy or impecunious as to skip the whole thing entirely and claim in some unadorned email greeting, that had all the Christmas cheer of cold gravy, that the sums of money involved had been dispatched to the Guns for Isis Charity or some such, regardless of whether you might approve or not.

As an aside - and I don’t want to sound too “Grinchy” - but don't you ever want to call them and say, “Thank you so much for your lovely thought, and I am so thrilled that you’re alive and well and thinking of others as always. But I was just wondering how much you sent to the charity? Is it a multiplication of the number of cards you would have bought at £1 each plus 85p 2nd class stamp times 250 to 300 chums? Call it £500 smackers for the Guns for Isis, or is it just £50? I am only asking because if you want to give another £50, you could give that to my new favourite charity the Roadkill Hospice Society c/o Capt Kneesup. Lambourn

Anyway, one November day 11 years ago, we (Madame) had a budget meeting re cards, as I’m sure happens in most houses at this time of year, and suddenly realised that not all cards are equal or remembered - apart from two oft-mentioned in the smarter circles. The first was an ink-signed card from Her Majesty, and the second was a signed commonplace from John Julius Norwich. We’d had lunch with John Julius and Mary, his good egg of a wife, on a couple of occasions and decided to flatter the great man by imitating his wonderful Christmas Commonplace with our own paler imitation. I think he approved - possibly because we weren’t selling it! And so was born the Boyd Christmas Snippets. It has always been a labour of love - as all Christmas tasks should be - in its production, and it is culled from the interweb, old Punch books of which I have most of the bound 20th-century annual editions and various pieces of ephemera garnered through the year.

This year we posted some 200 and hand-delivered 75; the numbers are not exact, albeit my Madame Defarge has a “List” marked by Hand, Post, and then In or Out. I haven’t dared ask her what that might mean—I hope it is delivery-related rather than societal!