Keeping in touch is for life, not just for Christmas
Monday, 17 December 2007
This morning I received a Round Robin letter. As I tore open the mail I was fooled briefly into thinking that I had in fact received two, but the second one had a picture of a crossed-out robin at the top; this gesture, I have just discovered, is supported by Wikipedia, who prefers the word 'circular' when describing letters sent to multiple recipients. So we'll leave the total number of RRs received at one for the time being. Anyway, I read it with pleasure, since it was good to hear news from a friend I have not seen for a while. Ben was languishing on the sofa at the time (we both began our Christmas holidays today) so I enquired of him, 'How do you feel about round robin letters, and why?' Averting his eyes momentarily from 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?', he immediately replied 'Hate them. They're completely impersonal, and they just say "I haven't got enough time to write to you individually, but here's a year's worth of my news anyway!" - I'd rather get a three-line letter addressed just to me than two sides of A4 which has been sent to the whole world as well.' My interest piqued by our differing opinions (not the first time this has happened in the Merrick household!), I eased 'The Cat That Could Open The Fridge' by Simon Hoggart (I've just realised that a sequel exists: 'The Hamster That Loved Puccini'. How glorious - I shall definitely be buying that as soon as possible!) off the bookshelf and sifted through it for more thoughts on the subject. There I was reminded that most people are divided into two opposing camps regarding RRs - those who love them and enjoy both writing and reading them, and those who detest them so much they feel the need to write to Simon Hoggart saying 'My wastepaper basket is too good for this!' (although I sense a third group creeping in and positioning themselves between the other two parties, consisting of those who send out circulars!!) So, now I'm on holiday and have time on my hands, I thought I'd devote some of it to thinking about why people send these things out in the first place, and why they go unappreciated - indeed, loathed in some cases - by so many of their recipients.
You may consider this a waste of a long-awaited break from school, but for a few years now I have been walking an uneasy tightrope between two people dear to me who belong firmly to the aforementioned opposing camps, and it's about time I made up my own mind on the subject. My problem is that while my husband hates them, my mother sends them out every year to many people of her acquaintance, complete with photos of our family and nuggets of news from the past year. Indeed, I provided Mother Muir with the required photos this year under cover of darkness, lest Ben found out and chastised me for frivolous usage of our shared technology and for contributing towards the furtherance of his pet hate (of course, he'll find out when our copy arrives in the mail, but it'll be too late by then). So the question is, should I be facilitating something which so many hate, or are the anti-RR brigade being both unreasonable and unseasonal?
Simon 'The Curmudgeon' Hoggart has a long list of gripes against RRs; he believes they allow the senders to boast about their children's brilliance and achievements ('Jemima got a distinction - of course! - for her Grade 8 Clarinet exam last term and will be taking her Grade 8 Piano next month - she has also somehow found time for her GCSEs, in which she achieved 10 A*s, and is playing hockey for the county squad too. Despite all this, she has managed to fit in a part-time job at Oxfam and runs the charities committee at school - we don't know how she does it!'); they can contain far too much information about the senders and their relatives / friends who are often not known to the reader ('We spent a fabulous week in Devon with Sue and Mike this summer - both have been plagued with health problems this year so it was important for them to have a break and a rest. Sue's sister and her husband were also able to join us for a weekend which was lovely.'); they are packed with holiday photos and anecdotes which show the authors up to be either crashingly dull or boastfully well-travelled ('Phoebe is currently halfway through her gap year in South America - she is backpacking with three of her friends from Sixth Form before she starts at Cambridge next September. Rupert has just got back from a month in New York; he was sent there to manage the Head Office for a short while, and is planning to spend the coming New Year in Australia with his girlfriend Lucy. We've loved receiving their news from various places around the world and have been sent hundreds of photos from them both - if you're interested we'll email you some of the highlights!'); they ramble on for far too long (sometimes for thousands of words and several pages); and, in general, Hoggart insists, they demonstrate smug self-congratulation with no consideration for the feelings of the reader, who may have had a comparatively difficult year and be in no mood to hear about someone else's kids' success, promotions and home improvements. Well, in fairness, I suppose you wouldn't be, if your eldest child had failed his A-Levels, your middle child had been arrested for shoplifting, your home had been flooded during the rainiest summer in living memory and your husband had been made redundant all in the space of twelve months, would you? Hoggart's book is hysterically funny, a characteristic which always encourages readers to see things from the author's point of view, and richly littered with a collection of extreme examples from the RR genre (sent in by RR-haters, and sometimes annotated or corrected in red pen where poor spelling or punctuation becomes the last straw for the unwilling recipient), many of which I do concede would be tiresome communications for anyone to receive during the festive period, for all the reasons listed above. But, at the same time, I really do enjoy getting them myself from my own friends, and I like reading the ones my parents receive when I go home for Christmas. So when does the sharing of news tip over into information overload, and why is a few personal lines in a Christmas card considered to be so very preferable to a typed A4 sheet that you know has also been printed out for the benefit of a couple of hundred other people? And is it simply the case that women love lots of news but men prefer the essential facts of a situation, which means 'Happy Christmas, with love from Fiona and Ben' is more than sufficient for them whilst their wives long for more?
I suppose one reason why I don't automatically hate RRs is because I've been raised by a mother who has sent them out for as long as I can remember; one possible consequence of this is, as with so much else in life, that I consider the sending of RRs to be normal and acceptable when others wouldn't because it's been modelled to me at home. But then again, casting my mind back over the past few annual RRs that Mother Muir has sent out as accompaniments to Christmas cards, I have to say she has never bragged about the 'achievements' of any of her three children (the most she would ever concede to my teachers at Parents' Evening about my involvement in extra-curricular music was that it 'kept me off the streets'), doesn't insert copious holiday snaps in between paragraphs (one of each family member is more than enough), keeps it brief (one side of A5, with generous margins and plenty of room for a personal PS at the bottom), refrains from littering her RRs with randomness or unnecessary references, and always scrupulously proof-reads. And here's the thing, as Rev Hugo Charteris is fond of saying: she is a good correspondent all year round, and doesn't simply save up loads of news between January and December and then unleash it on her unsuspecting circle of family and friends. The vast majority of people who receive Mother Muir's yearly offering are also phoned and written to on a fairly regular basis. However, she's acquired quite a few friends over the years, and it would be impossible for her to write personally and in any detail to all of them during the festive season, given the many other pressures on her time. And this, thinking back to Ben's comment earlier, seems to be at the very root of the problem that a lot of Simon Hoggart's contributors have with RRs - they rant about the fact that the senders have not made the effort to see or contact them personally at any point over the last two decades, yet still consider it acceptable to force a detailed description of their comings and goings on all and sundry every December. And I think this is the only valid reason for objecting to RRs as a method of communication, but a good one nonetheless.
Yes, it can be quite annoying to receive a printed sheet of news from someone you barely know and which refers in detail to people you have never met. It's a bit like logging on to Facebook and scanning down your homepage to find little else but videos and photos posted by distant acquaintances (who added you as a friend but who never actually contact you), when what you really want is a lovely long message or wall post from a friend with whom you are in regular touch. After all, contact with people should partly be about sharing your own news with others, but if the recipient doesn't feel at least a small glow of warmth upon reading a piece of mail because he or she has been personally remembered by the sender, it's a bit of a waste of the printer cartridge, is it not?
Christmas, irrespective of your religious beliefs or lack thereof, is a really good time to remind family and friends that you are thinking of them, hence the popularity of the Round Robin at this point in the year. But it shouldn't be the only time. I think those who keep in touch with their loved ones consistently and personally the rest of the time should be forgiven the yearly 'Christmas Letter' - if they're making the effort to maintain a relationship with you between January and November, let them send their communal greetings as the year draws to a close and don't complain about it. This is, after all, a frantically busy time of year for most people and trying to write the same length of letter individually to everyone on your Christmas card list would pose a challenge to the most faithful of correspondents. Having said that, there's always time to keep in some sort of proper personal contact with one's nearest and dearest, whether that's by email, phone, card, Facebook, text or - deepest bliss - a proper letter. It would be easy to proclaim that those who can't be bothered with that but can somehow find the time to put together a detailed summary of the year's successes to be sent impersonally to three hundred of their 'friends' should expect their Round Robin to be folded into a paper aeroplane and sent sailing into the recycling bin, but on the other hand the people who send them must surely be delighted to receive them from others. So I suppose the best conclusion to draw is this: a RR once a year is much better than no communication at all, and it shows you haven't been forgotten by the person who sent it. But if receiving them irritates you, either say so and save a tree in the process, or try to build up what you consider to be the right sort of contact with the RR senders - make it a New Year's Resolution to be a better correspondent yourself, and maybe the idea will catch on. If all else fails, Simon Hoggart would probably be pleased to hear from you as he prepares for Volume 3!
posted by fiona @ 14:19
