Thank you for your "E-Christmas card", you lazy self-promoting cheapskates!

Dear Mike and Sue

Your "E-Christmas Card" arrived in my Inbox today. Unlike that from Lucille and Harry it didn't contain any self-congratulatory guff about how you had donated what you would have spent on Christmas Cards to Cancer Relief. So I must assume that your motives were twofold. Firstly by dispatching  these abominations to your friends you, in theory anyway, manage to "send" a Christmas Card without actually having to make the effort of choosing and writing a card, buying a stamp and posting it. I hope that you used the time saved productively. Second you have saved yourselves some money. A card and stamp sets us back around 80p so to Email 100 greetings rather than post them is a handy saving of £80 - not to be sneezed at I'm sure. It'll buy you a couple of bottles of decent wine on your upcoming Caribbean cruise.

As for Lucille and Harry they not only enjoy the time savings that you have but manage to preen themselves among their friends at the same time, "The money we would have spent on cards we have donated to Cancer Relief" they say. Right it's an act of charity then, not laziness. But hold on a second. Lucille and Harry are not exactly on the bread line - blimey Harry's brand new Jaguar must have set him back £40k at least ! So if he'd wanted to donate £80 (or whatever) to his favourite charity he could have done so and at the same time spent the same on sending Christmas cards couldn't he? But he wouldn't have been able to boast about that would he? Very Un-British to congratulate yourself in public on your charity and generosity.

I suspect that both you, Mike and Sue, and Lucille and Harry probably did send a few actual Christmas Cards to family and to those on your lists they really wanted to keep in with. It's just that we didn't make the cut. I thought about printing and cutting out your ghastly electronic cards and hanging them on the wall alongside those real cards in which people had written their personal messages to us, and which they had taken the trouble to buy, and write, and stamp and post. But I decided not to and transferred them instantly into my "Junk Mail" Folder instead.

Merry Christmas, I hope our card arrived safely

Paddy and Ann