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Ian McMillan: I take it all back, there's a big day on the cards
LIKE most people's houses at this time of year, mine is festooned with Christmas cards. People have different ways of the displaying them, of course: the card tree, the string, the available surfaces covered to the exclusion of everything else.
Our old next door neighbour Harry Lang used to open them, look at them, say "very nice" and put them in a drawer, then on January 6, he'd get them out of the drawer and chuck them in the bin. Each to his own, of course, especially at Christmas.
At McMillan Mansions, we favour the Blu-tak and Sellotape method: stick half a dozen together by the corner, get a bob of Blu-tak and thumb them to the wall. There's always one bunch of cards that's heavier than the others, and over the years I've come to realise that the crashing sound you hear in the night isn't a Christmas burglar after your socks and deodorant but simply Auntie Mabel landing on top of Mr Bisby and that couple from Nuneaton you met that time in Weston Super Mare.
Landing in a metaphorical, pile-of-cards way, of course. Auntie Mabel would never land on anybody if she could help it.
Gazing at my cards the other day, though, I began to think about the card manufacturers, and I realised that, of course, card-making, like quince-harvesting, is a seasonal thing.
There's a steady trickle throughout the year as people mark birthdays and anniversaries and new arrivals and sad departures; there are peaks at Easter and Mother's Day and, of course, there's the Christmas bonanza. Then there's a slowdown after the festive season when our card buying almost grinds to a halt.
Apart, of course, from that odd group of people who rush to newsagents and supermarkets on Boxing Day and snap up cheap packs of cards for next year. Cheap packs of cards that they put away very carefully in a safe place. A place so safe that, in fact, they forget where it is and the cards only turn up years later when the upper shelves of the wardrobe in the spare room are being raided for the grandchildren's dressing-up box.
There they are, the cards you bought on Boxing Day 1998, just waiting to be used. Still, once a bargain, always a bargain. For card manufacturers, though, the fag-end of Christmas and the start of the New Year must be a fallow period, the equivalent of building sites laying people off at this time of year because you can't build in sub-zero temperatures, or turkey farmers realising that not many people are going to fancy a turkey leg for several weeks.
I've had an idea, though: an idea for a new range of greetings cards that can keep the makers going over this dark period and, if I market it right, can make me enough money to spend subsequent Christmases in Malibu, sitting on a beach sipping an exotic cocktail the colour of the Barnsley away kit.
Let me explain: people often get given Christmas presents that they don't want. When I was a surly teenager, one of our elderly neighbours bought me a pair of driving gloves and some polish for my car. The car I hadn't got because I couldn't drive and didn't intend to start. It was the equivalent a buying a vegan a family size pork pie. My mother said just to smile and say thank you. I managed the thank you but not the smile because I was surly.
I know that, all over the country, people will have been given the equivalent of the non-driver's driving gloves: the trowel for the person who hasn't got a garden; the woolly hat for the person who always gets a terrible rash as soon as they even think about putting on a woolly hat; the brass band CD for the person who hates brass bands with a feeling so strong they sometimes suspect they've got some kind of physical or psychological disease; the stockings and suspenders to rekindle passion when all the wife wants (and which will rekindle passion in their own way) are bedsocks and slippers.
So, today, December 29, has been scientifically proven to be the day when most of these unwanted jumpers and ill-fitting basques and deep-fat fryers are returned to the shop. The queues will be long and grumpy. The returned gifts will have been, at worst, ill-thought out and at best, kindly meant. And, of course, none of them will fit. So shouldn't this be the occasion for a humorous card ?
Happy Taking Back Day! It's a day for family celebration, after all, as whole generations get together to return their unwanted and unasked-for gifts, and so why not create a card to celebrate the occasion? Just buy the card before Christmas, post it on Christmas Eve and it will raise a smile as it plops on the mat as you're hunting for the receipt and wondering how to get a vaulting-pole into the back of a family saloon...
A very Happy Taking Back Day to all my readers!
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Friday 25 May 2012
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