Notebook: Christmas cards revived by growing hatred of Zoom

If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said smugly that Christmas cards were a dying tradition and a total waste of paper. But 2020 has been a year of turning assumptions on their heads and cherishing the brief moments that made a terrible twelve months bearable. And so, for the first time since it was mandatory in primary school (for reputation’s sake anyway), I have spent entire evenings writing Christmas cards for my friends. In a year of hated Zoom-fatigue and stale catch ups on WhatsApp, handwriting these missives felt quaint and intimate, a chance to thank friends for being an unwavering presence in an unpredictable year and to look forward to more face-to-face socialising in the next.

A revived interest in Christmas cards then led me down a very strange internet rabbit-hole: the uncanny and somewhat grotesque world of Victorian Christmas cards. For reasons quite unknown, Victorian Christmas cards were less about snow, glitter and Santa Clause and more about bloodthirsty snowmen, killer frogs and men who were half-human, half-roast beef (yes, you read that right). It is thought that the cards functioned more as conversation starters than spreaders of festive cheer. I will leave you to make up your own minds on these macabre creations.

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Unable to contain their festive cheer, Rita Ora and Kay Burley were unlikely headline bedfellows this week. Both chose to flout covid rules to celebrate their birthdays. Whilst this reeks of hypocrisy from Burley and entitlement from Ora, these stories feed into a general feeling of lethargy around the rules. Ipsos Mori and Kings College London suggests one in four people have found it harder to follow the rules this lockdown, citing bad weather, being worn out by the crisis and perceived unfairness behind which regions faced which restrictions as key reasons.

A team of researchers from Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard also recently published the results of a survey which suggested your personality type can dictate how likely you are to follow the rules. The survey characterised personality through levels of agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness. They found that being agreeable and conscientious are likely to make individuals more law-abiding.

The study suggests that governments should tailor public health messaging towards extroverts, who have a fundamental need for social stimulation that will make it harder to abide by the rules. This is not to say that either Burley or Ora should be exonerated by a quick personality test, but the study adds necessary nuance to the current conversation. It is far too reductionist to brand anyone breaking rules as “bad” and offer a moral high ground to the rule-abiding “good” citizens.

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My socialising needs have been appeased slightly this lockdown by moving into a flatshare with a couple of friends. There is a primitive pull for twenty-somethings to move out and begin carving out the boundaries of their own lives. I sympathise greatly with all my peers who have had their plans to do so put-on hold by covid-19 (though of course, being able to live with parents is a privilege in itself). Living with people who are at the same stage of their lives and careers has the magic effect of creating an almost pseudo-office space during the weekdays, which makes work-from-home more bearable. My housemates and I feel a little robbed of the possibility of a housewarming, but more than anything we are very grateful for our little space to live and work in.

Moving out during the pandemic has made me very adverse to the possibility of living alone, for fear of another lockdown and the loneliness that would personally ensue. In the two decades up to 2019, households where couples share with at least one other adult, were the fastest growing. I think we will see a continuation of this trend. Areas like Hackney Wick have long homed communes of young people living in an almost-continuation of university halls. Maybe this is the future for gen-Z and millennials? A friend recently declared all “twenties” extendable until the age of 32 due to the pandemic. Perhaps we will be living in cramped house shares, chasing this lost year of youth and autonomy for the rest of our lives. Or maybe, a year from now things will be back to normal and the memories of the crisis will only make us more grateful for the present. Afterall, I did write last time asking for more optimism, please.