Cards and other Christmas traditions

Whilst you enjoy a well-earned rest in the company of your family and look forward to your Christmas dinner, spare a thought for those who have to work over the festive season. According to the TUC, more than one million British workers will be giving up their time over the holiday season – around 3.4% of those in employment. For those in the caring sector it’s just another day with nursing staff and doctors having to work over the festive period as illness knows no seasonal bounds. Indeed, I have good reason to be thankful for their efforts as I was forced to take an elderly relative to hospital one Christmas Eve. It is also a busy day for the clergy with the TUC estimating that there will be around 25k working tomorrow – as many as are employed providing care for the elderly.

But whilst Britain appears to shut down over the holiday season, it is worthwhile recalling that it did not used to be this way. Whilst Dickensian Christmas themes have become a seasonal staple, the poor working man did not get much time off over the festive period in Dickens’ day. Although Christmas Day was inaugurated as a bank holiday in 1834, Boxing Day only became a public holiday in 1871 – a year after Dickens died. But the passage of the Bank Holiday Act of 1871 meant that workers were now entitled to six whole days of holiday per year – many people will be taking more than that amount of time this Christmas alone.

Another of the great Christmas traditions dating back to Dickens' time is the widespread exchange of cards (see chart for more facts and figures).  Apparently, we send enough cards that if we placed them alongside each other they would cover the world’s circumference 500 times, which is an awful lot of paper. As one academic article put it “Every year, the British public celebrates Jesus's birthday by cutting down eight million trees, wrapping enough presents to smother Guernsey, binning billions of greetings cards, and then throwing away £1bn worth of food.” Whilst this sounds somewhat Scrooge-like, there is a serious point to be made here that the average UK household raises its monthly spending by almost one-third in December on things we may or may not want.

Many of the cards we send will be decorated with traditional winter themes but ironically it does not snow very often in Britain around the Christmas period. That said, winters tended to be much colder in the nineteenth century than they are today and this historical echo goes a long way towards explaining why winter themes dominate our cards. In fact, there is more chance of snow between January and March than there is in December, and the change to the Gregorian calendar in 1752 effectively pushed Christmas day back by 12 days thus further reducing the chance of snow on the big day. Moreover, the evidence does suggest that northern hemisphere winters are getting warmer. Climate change, which makes the northern European climate warmer and wetter, is likely to further reduce the chances of snow on 25 December. To the extent that environmental considerations are increasingly impacting on the choices people make, it is likely that in future we will celebrate Christmas differently compared with today.

One of the longer standing Christmas traditions is to look back to the past and argue that it always used to be better. As The Scotsman newspaper reported at Christmas 1900, “The seasons seem to have undergone so much change of late that orthodox Christmas weather, with its associations of frost and snow, and its exhilarating atmosphere, would appear to be almost a thing of the past.” Much as I fear the effect of global warming, somehow I don’t miss all that frost and snow. Merry Christmas to you and yours.