Important to Keep in Touch During Coronavirus Christmas ~ Cheer them up with a card and personal letter!
Published: 17 November 2020
So, what I have been doing for the past week? Did news that they had installed a Democrat in the White House appall me so much that I have not been able to focus and write? No, even stranger than that, I have been busy writing my Christmas cards ~ either a case of there’s forward planning for you, or its time he invested in a new calendar.
Nothing quite as spectacular. I have been writing cards to folks back home, to friends and family in the UK, and cognizant of the fact that the post from Kaliningrad to England is not exactly the 21st centuries’ answer to a hypersonic version of Pony Express, I hope to have mailed them in good time.
Another reason for planning ahead is that every year I include a ‘brief’ note with my card. This has become as traditional as Christmas dinner, party hats, Christmas crackers and auntie Ivy turning Christmas day into a rugby scrum as she insists on clawing open everybody else’s presents.
Important to keep in touch during coronavirus Christmas
My Christmas letter has become such an important element of the annual Christmas ritual that its up there with seasonal sayings like ‘just what I always wanted’, when it is quite obvious that you didn’t (I mean, who in his right mind would wear a jumper like that, and when did your gran lust after a WWII German tin helmet (or even a WWII German in a tin helmet?)) ~ and ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have!”, when you obviously didn’t: that’s the aftershave you were given by someone last year and which you personally would not touch with a barge pole and neither would anyone else. Mind you it makes the perfect Christmas present for social distancing.
The thing about my Christmas letters is that although you have to state out loud at UK post offices these days what you have in your ‘packet’ ~ and my letters are known for being rather bulky, so they always ask ~ they always get through, even though sometimes I cannot resist answering, at first in a whisper, “It’s an inflatable doll,” and then, in response to the lady behind the counter urging me to ‘speak up’, to call out stridently, “It’s an inflatable doll,” so that everyone can hear (you should try this sometime, it really is fun!).
No stopping those Christmas letters
Yes, my letters always get through. Like Reader’s Digest junk mail, electricity and gas bills, even if the Post Office had been sold to China (what’s that, oh, it has been) and my letters rerouted via the M25, carried in the pocket of a young thief travelling on a skateboard during rush-hour, my letters always get through.
They zip past defiled statues, hoody-wearing muggers on handbag-stealing mopeds and bearded men burning poppies. They cruise through ganja-stenched knife-secreted carnivals, through nice areas deprived by people. As slippery as Hope not Hate, they riot their way down Looting Street, defying all manner of social distancing, lockdowns and Tiers for fears and, before you can say Hoorah for Brexit or Joe Biden is as honest as Clinton, they sail up your drive, through your letter box and plummet onto your doormat quicker than the stink from a suspect scientific claim.
They are so popular, my Yuletide missives, that family and friends leave home for them, and come back after Christmas ~ a long while after Christmas. Some people board up their letter boxes, others disguise them as something intimate in such a way that were you to insert a letter through them, you’d have the neighbours shout ‘pervert!’. Some teach their dogs to savage them, and others, those with ‘Beware of the Cat’ on their doors, train their feline friends to hide them under the Christmas tree ~ and scrape the soil back over.
One year my brother shoved his letter under the mistletoe, prompting his gay friend to say that he would rather kiss his own arse. He is a lonely guy, but no worries, he is double-jointed and quite the contortionist.
Selfish people, those who stockpiled toilet rolls when they heard the word pandemic, convert them into paper hats and hide the Christmas crackers for pulling on their own when they think no one is looking. Ahh, but someone is always looking, especially in these days of essential travel only. Do they really think that they can get away with it?
“Where are you going in that Support Bubble Car?”
“I am a victim of self-isolation and social distancing, officer. I am shunning all that I have ever known and all those that know me, even those who have tried to lose me, give me away or pretend that I don’t exist, such as my mother. I am going somewhere where they can’t track and trace me, and there, in the privacy of somebody else’s Tier 1 home, I will hide from the world and pull my Christmas cracker.”
“Very well,” says the Social Distancing Marshall, “but no laughing at the joke inside the cracker, mind. This is no time to be enjoying life, and don’t forget to wear your mask.”
Sorry, that was uncalled for.
“Hello, I think I may have coronavirus. I have been trying to telephone the hospital for the past three hours and nobody has answered.”
“Sorry, the hospital is as full as boatload of migrants from France. Wait a moment. Oh, it is a boat load of migrants from France. Please hang yourself. I mean hang up and try the Samarlians.”
The Samarlians ~ a not-for-profit organization that will talk you out of the ‘easy way out’:
Answer machine: “Hello, you have reached the end of your tether. I am sorry, due to a high volume of excuses about coronavirus we are unable to take your call at the moment, please leave your name and telephone number and you will never hear from us again. You might like to waste what remains of your life by visiting our website, goingaroundincircles.con, where you can often never find what it is you want to know using our FAQ Offs ~ Frequently Asked Questions Offline ~ alternatively, you will find the end of the line at your nearest Midland Mainline Station.”
Once, all you had to do was press Button A to be connected and Button B to get your money back. Now ‘you have the following options’, more numbers than the National Lottery and about the same chance of winning.
What my coronavirus Christmas letters mean to the recipients
Rumour has it that carol singers have written songs based on the contents of my Christmas letters and sold the rights to Leonard Cohen.
Christmas vicars have read them out in their sermons and have been summarily excommunicated.
Edgar Allan Poe, who essentially travelled by TARDIS, was inspired to write The Masque of the Red Death having read my treatise ‘Lockdown ~ the most effective life saver since leaches’.
{See end of article for image credit*}
My letters have tweaked the ears of statesmen, tickled the underbelly of boat-owning philanthropists and have sunk a thousand ships, or would have if I had my way ~ where is my letter to Sir Francis Drake?
Napoleon stuck his arm up his vest after reading one of my letters, and what would Lord Nelson have asked Hardy to do for him had he read my letter before someone shot him first?
Thank heavens Adolf burnt his letter!
As for ordinary mortals, some wrap their present to auntie Joan in them and still others wrap them around uncle Martin’s chestnuts, who would otherwise lose them on Christmas morn as he struggles to adjust his mighty pendulums attached to his very large grandfather’s clock (thank the Lord for Spell Check!).
Looking forward to my letters
People look forward to my letters so much that they ‘wish it could be Christmas every day”. One day they will write a song about it and play it every year with depressing regularity.
This year they are all busy singing to, ‘So this is Christmas and what have you done. Sat in self-isolation it isn’t much fun.” I know, let’s open one of Mick’s Christmas letters and cheer ourselves up (gunshot off stage).
My letters have a sentimental and emotional appeal. They are up there, tugging at the heart strings like that old romantic Christmas Carol, who your mother caught your father with (also Christmas Connie, Christmas Christine and Christmas Cordelia, well, Christmas comes but once a year).
Ahh, the old ones are the best (Connie was 73).
Lovely old Christmas carols
What memories these well-known carols:
“Drug King Wenceslas looked out from his boat to Dover
When the snow is not found out we’ll roll the UK over
Brightly shone the hotel sign, the waiting bus was free
It was worth the trip through several countries and across the sea, He! He!”
And do you remember this one:
“Away in a 4-star I don’t pay for my bed, the tax-payer in England pays for it instead …”
And how could you possibly forget:
“Twinkle, Twinkle celeb star who the F..K do you think you are?
Pontificating up on high?
Spreading all those EU lies.
Twinkle, Twinkle talentless star paid too much, too much by far”
Dear old Christmas Carol, one of Charles Dickens’ favourites. This will be the one year that Ebenezer Scrooge will be looking forward to a visit from the ghosts of Christmas Past, anything has to be better than Father Boris’s Christmas Present.
Important to Keep in Touch During Coronavirus Christmas
Although it is very important to keep in touch during a coronavirus Christmas, I don’t as a rule send the prime minister a Christmas letter, besides he will be far too busy this year reading and listening to fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm. Chris Witty and Sir Patrick Vallance, sorry I don’t know them ~ and neither do you, but there is a sort of chemistry there. It reminds me of that Chad Valley Junior Scientists set I was given at Christmas a long while ago. As I recall, it was a very disappointing present, all smoke and mirrors, bits missing, as incomplete as a Liberal manifesto and it had a very funny smell about it, something slightly fishy.
Send them a Christmas letter? I would not give them the steam off my turkey. What I do like to do, however, is spice up my Christmas offerings with the odd anecdote from Christmases past.
“Please, pretty please do tell us one.”
Well, all right, if you beg nicely.
Once upon a time, long ago, when England was really England, I worked part time as a waiter. I was young once, and in those days I was a teenager. These were the bad old days, before teenagers became entitled and were able to live at home with mum until their 45th birthday (you can ~ could? ~ always take a loan).
Teenagers in those days were not deprived as they are today. They were lucky, in that they did not have the internet from which to plagiarise articles to pass their exams with and, without keyboards and computers, they had the fun of writing all of their essays out by hand, correcting them by hand and then rewriting them by hand for presentation. This meant that they had less time for anything else, which was good, because there were no smartphones in those days and nothing to twiddle on, no Twatter, Arsebook, Snapcrap and the like. Instead, after school teenagers went out and worked.
I worked at the Talbot Hotel in Oundleshire, a very prestigious establishment, with a long history dating back to Elizabethan times and with a staircase that was said to have come from Fotheringay Castle where Mary Queen of Scots lost her head and on which staircase I almost lost my job for telling two old ladies that Mary was always looking for it in the rooms that they had paid for.
It was a posh place, the Talbot of Oundle, and still is. Standards were high. We had to wear black trousers, white shirt, cummerbund, little white pointed tail jackets and a black dicky bow. We looked like clockwork penguins. We were always well turned out, apart from one person whose flies were never done up, as if, we suspected, by no fault of accident.
It was three days before Christmas, us well turned out and him with his flies undone, that we were called to wait upon a very important table, several tables in fact containing the governors and alumni from Oundle’s prestigious public schools.
I had two salvers: one with Christmas seasoning and the other containing peas on my arm.
Several of we waiters moved along in single file serving our guests of honour. And then it came to her.
She was gorgeous, stunning, wearing a low-cut dress. She had the most diaphanous orbs you could ever imagine ~ yes, her eyes were beautiful. Mesmerised by love, or something that starts with ‘L’ and has the same number of letters, I leant over her and with the seasoning in my hand, asked:
“Would you like stuffing madam?”
The timing could not have been more perfect. Hardly had I realised that I should have used the word ‘seasoning’ than my waiter friend at the side of me, my pal, my very good pal, gave a purposeful nudge to my elbow and off went a spoonful of peas straight down the lady’s cleavage.
Talk about Captain Kirk’s ‘Space, the final frontier’!
And really, what did it sound like: “Madam, can I help you?” As she is reaching down inside, red faced and all a fluster, for those penetrative peas.
Sounds like something out of a Carry On film? How about Carry on Down the Cleavage? Rather that than Carry on Down the Pandemic.
Important to Keep in Touch During Coronavirus Christmas
But what has this got to do with it being very important to keep in touch during coronavirus Christmas? I confess, I have digressed, when my real intention for writing this piece was to say how nice, affectionate and charming Russian Christmas cards are. Different again to the crass and vulgar things that they churn out in the UK.
Every year in the UK, Christmas cards get bigger, which is a problem for my family and friends, for it means that instead of a ‘short’ letter I can really go to town and insert a tome like War & Peace. But British Christmas cards do not just get bigger they become more vulgar each year. In keeping with declining moral standards, smutty innuendo ~which is as traditional as laxatives on Boxing Day ~ has given way to images of a semi-pornographic nature and to captions laced with obscenity. It is enough to make you lie and say that Rubber Band has comedic talent!
How much nicer these traditional Russian cards are. They remind me of the sentimental cards that were produced in wartime England ~ soft, delicate, romantic and affectionate
Of course, they are not really Christmas cards as such, as this is an Orthodox Christian country, and Christmas is celebrated on 7th January. No, these are, for the sake of accuracy, Happy New Year cards ~Snovam Gordams.
Snovam Gordam (Happy New Year!) I shouted that last year on the stroke of midnight. You did too? Really?
Hmmm, we’d better shout twice as loud this year, as I don’t think He was listening.
By the way, sorry if you did not receive my Christmas card and letter.
No, I shouldn’t think you are!
Leonard Cohen: Waiting for the Miracle ~ A song for 2021
- Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death
(Image credit: Harry Clarke – Printed in Edgar Allan Poe'sTales of Mystery and Imagination, 1919., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2348546)
Copyright © 2018-2020 Mick Hart. All rights reserved. {Dickens & Masque of the Red Death images are In the Public Domain}
