IT SEEMS like only yesterday that Noddy Holder was guldering on about hanging up yer stocking on the wall and now, here you are in February, choosing the perfect card to express love, investing in a huge bunch of overpriced red roses, or just rolling your eyes.
There are those about here who find the constant days of celebration a source of angst... first Christmas, then a birthday, then Valentine’s Day and then it’s Mother’s Day.
Short on inspiration, heavy on perspiration – What’s a man gonna do?
I point out on a yearly basis: “Scrap Mother’s Day. I am NOT your mother.”
Still, this treadmill of happy clappy celebrations is just another symptom of a consumer-driven, buy, buy, buy society and I, for one, am keen to jump off the bandwagon.
Clearing out the cupboards the other day – I invested in the Little Swedish Book of Death De-Cluttering and boy, do I regret it – I came upon a pile of cards sent down the years. They were beautiful, the messages were touching – some of the ones I didn’t write were rather good too.
As a strong believer in recycling, I did ponder about the morality of simply shoving an old but beautifully written card into a new envelope and delivering it to my loved one. Would he notice? Would he be hurt? Would he accuse me of being true to my Scottish-Irish miserly roots?
Watch this space...
The cards I found brought back a flood of memories. As a friend said the other day, you don’t hold on to emails, do you? But letters... they are true treasure.
She was clearing her attic recently – maybe she got a copy of that dratted Swedish book for Christmas – and came across a series of letters written across the continents to her beloved in the long ago. They brought back so many memories – that she sat and read and remembered and the attic didn’t get very cleared.
In my mother’s house, there are letters and cards dating back to the 1950s when she met my father who was 11 years older and told her at their first meeting that he wouldn’t see 30 again, except on a door.
Back then, letters were the glue of many relationships. And when you lived 70 miles apart, you reached for the Stephen’s Ink and the Basildon Bond.
He wrote to her; she wrote back... only my father, being rather blunt, pointed out in one such missive that he had kept himself late for work waiting for her letter to arrive in the post and it didn’t. Could she perhaps use the main post office as opposed to the post box on the corner?
When my mother came upon that the other day, she laughed. Thirty years after his death, she finds solace in old letters and cards from him that she kept down the years.
My letters and cards live in a box on top of the wardrobe – there are Valentine cards and baby cards, scraps of notes and tufts of blonde baby hair stuffed into an old Manila envelope.
Among the horde is a mystery Valentine card I received when I was working in a local paper.
“Will I ever catch you... from the city desk,” wrote my dad – I knew it was him.
It still makes me smile.
He never wanted his daughters to feel left out or unloved, so he went the extra mile. When we got our first cars, he was always keen to help out. No matter what needed done, it always cost just £20.
It was years later that I found out the arrangement between him and our car mechanic, Danny.
“Tell the girls it’s £20 and I’ll make up the difference,” he had said.
When he died, Danny told my mother: “Those girls will fairly miss their father.” We did.
And now, I treasure the letters he sent me on pale blue Basildon Bond and his good fountain pen is my inheritance.
At Christmas, I sat down to write our Christmas cards. The days when every shelf was crammed with cards are disappearing and the cost of a modern postage stamp is an added disincentive – it’s not like it’s a Penny Black. We are witnessing the death of the Christmas card.
Perhaps we should start a 'back to pen and paper' campaign.
A card is precious, a card can be kept, but above all, like a puppy, it is forever, not just for Christmas.
