The hardest question in the world is something to do with quantum physics. The second hardest is, “How are you?” Sure, there are easy answers, but they are not good ones. Saying you are fine just puts the onus on your interlocutor to find something worth discussing. It should be a punishable offence.
If instead you blurt out your travails, you risk boring both of you. (“A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you,” the American humourist Bert Leston Taylor wrote.)
So the trick is to find a response that is at least somewhat revealing without being overwhelming. It’s much easier in theory than in practice, especially while hoovering canapés at a drinks party.
This challenge is mirrored by what we write in Christmas cards. Most cards fall into one of the opposing extremes: they say too little or too much.
Every time I open a card with nothing but a signature, my heart sinks. Why go to the trouble of buying a card and (extortionately priced) stamp and writing out my address, but not adding even a couple of lines that might bring us closer?
I’d settle for a signature from people who are so close that I already know their news or from those who are so famous that mere acknowledgment is a gift (I’m still waiting). From everyone else, it seems a wasted opportunity.
These moments of missed intimacy are why it’s possible to go to a birthday party or a funeral and discover from a speech that one of your life-long friends has a deep passion for photography/music education/truffle-hunting of which you were completely unaware. The instinctive reaction is: I should have asked. In fact, they should have told you. Sharing one’s inner passions is a responsibility of friendship.
Hold on, you say, surely it’s better to send a detail-less Christmas card than to go to the other extreme: a round robin letter. Round robin letters have the worst reputation. These narratives of family news are mocked for being both boring and boastful: “Samantha passed her driving test, with what the instructor called some of the best parallel parking he’d seen in the Winchester area.” Maybe the only greater bore than someone who tells you how they are when you ask is someone who tells you how they are when you haven’t asked?
In fact, too much information is better than too little. Thus the time has come to save the round robin letter from its critics (and from some of its writers). There is a precious tradition here, which predates social media and exceeds it. Round robins encourage us to reflect on our lives and to remember the people we’ve lost touch with. They are left around the house at Christmas, where — take it from experience — they can reach further than a WhatsApp.
I suspect part of the hostility to round robins is that they seem forced, and we want our relationships to feel spontaneous. I don’t want to read your news in an impersonal letter, I just want to know it. I don’t want you to be reminded of my birthday, I want you to remember it. I want to imagine that I am present in your thoughts, even though we haven’t seen each other all year.
Modern life makes all this implausible. Most of us will only remember our friends’ birthdays if they are stored in our phone calendars. We will only know about each other’s lives if we are told about them directly. Otherwise we will forget our friends’ children’s names, and we will spend the first minutes of any family reunion painfully stumbling around in the dark, asking questions like: “So, are you still a doctor — yes, dentist — I meant dentist!”
Round robin letters allow relationships to survive the distances and distractions of modern life. They are the friendship equivalent of a mid-ranking CIA official visiting Beijing for talks: they can pave the way for a proper meeting.
Yes, they can be mundane — but that’s because our lives are mundane. Most of our successes and failures fade when placed in cold black-and-white. Evelyn Waugh once chastised his wife for writing him a letter “as dull as [her] life”, adding “I am simply not interested in Bridget’s children. Do grasp that.” But he was, in technical terms, a complete git.
Yes, they are uninvited — but if you don’t want to read one, you can just bin it. Even if you feel obliged to read a bad round robin, it’s still much less painful than having to listen to a bore in person. You can laugh at it in the privacy of your own home. A woman on Mumsnet said she’d received one a few years ago saying the son was struggling to choose between Oxford and Cambridge; the following year’s edition reported that he had decided to choose Exeter: “We’re still laughing.” I am nonetheless prepared to bet that the average round robin has fewer humblebrags than the average Instagram account.
That said, we might as well try to make Christmas round robins better written. (My suspicion is that they are usually written by the most boring person in the household, while the most capable person is off doing something more essential.) My advice to anyone writing one is to start early: let it percolate in your mind over weeks, don’t try to download the information in one go. Consider personalising each one. More importantly, get an editor — ideally someone who doesn’t entirely like you, for example one of your children. They will take pleasure in scraping out the ridiculous. One Twitter user reported that she’d edited her parents’ missive to remove the number of funerals they’d attended.
Already, round robins seem limited to the Anglosphere: friends in France, Italy and Colombia tell me that they have never seen such things. Even in the Anglosphere, their numbers are shrinking in the face of mockery. Soon they will be entirely replaced by generic WhatsApp messages with seven Santa Claus emojis.
We need more tell-all letters, not fewer. If you can’t bear an A4 printout, then at least handwrite a few lines of intimacy into every Christmas card. Not everyone has a novel in them, but almost everyone has the start of a decent round robin.
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
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