…Because?
Christmas cards used to be about mangers, kings and shepherds. Then they became about robins. Then about reindeer. Now they are about us.“Religion has gone away,” said the novelist AS Byatt “and all we are left with is ourselves, so we have to be interested in ourselves. And we can be psychoanalytically interested in ourselves or sociologically interested in ourselves or interested in why we wear these clothes rather than those, or we can put ourselves in reality houses on the television.”
Of course, Frazer, being a man of the cloth believes in all that superstitious bronze age claptrap (at least, I would expect that he does), so we should be unsurprised that he bemoans the shift from religious hokum to more secular ideas and images.
Personally, I don’t see a problem. If people want to send cards to their friends and family adorned with images of themselves, well, so what? Yeah, it’s a bit egotistic and possibly tacky, but it doesn’t portend the end of the known world. Indeed, a shift away from superstition to reality is no bad thing.
As I don’t do social media and I don’t do Christmas either, I don’t send cards, so not an issue for me anyway…
This is not even “new.”
My Wifes family have a whole collection of “Christmas” cards from the 1800s, of which most have a family picture surrounded by Holly and ivy, and stuff, on them.
ONE is an origional Daguerreotype! 🙂 🙂
If what someone does causes no harm or expense to anyone else against their will, then WTF does it have to do with any other person? Or organisation? Or the state?
It might not be something that I would do, but if someone else wishes to, they’re free (or at least, they should be) to do so without complaint or censure.
A pox & a plague on all busybodies!
I always send cards. I pick the cheesiest and add captions that debase their intended meaning.
Messing up Christmas is fun.
I only send cards, now, to people whose e-mail addresses I don’t have …
The others get an e-card.
And, of course, it’s “Yule” since the festival, as that ultra-christian miserable bastard Cromwell, well knew – which is why he banned “christmas” of course.
Funny how the believers in Bronze-Age goatherders’ myths always conveniently “forget” that, isn’t it?