The robin is, by all accounts, an aggressive little blighter, so it’s fitting that it should have found itself attached to one of the scariest Christmas traditions.
The round-robin letter; chronicling the year’s personal highlights and invariably sent, I’ve come to realise, by the over-achievers in your social circle.
Let’s get the caveats out of the way. If this were just an envy thing, I wouldn’t even be writing this. In my social circle, at any rate, these are good people who have worked hard. I don’t begrudge them a penny of the rewards and I rejoice in the sumptuous lives they have built for themselves and their children.
But we are a competitive species, assessing ourselves in relation to those around us with all the diligence of a racing driver en route to the first bend. This is not the green-eyed monster at work; just the baleful eye of self-analysis.
However fond you might be of their authors, these end-of-year epistles can leave you crushed.
I’ve come to know the first three weeks of December as the season of “In Case You’ve Forgotten How Crap Your Life Is, Allow Us to Remind You.”
Once, just once, I’d love to read a Christmas round-robin letter from a couple in the same dead-end jobs and same dead-end marriage, bringing up the same utterly unremarkable children while driving the same car they drove when David Cameron was in Number 10; their sole nod to globetrotting these last 12 months a long weekend in Yarmouth.
Alas, those people always make do with a card, for some reason.
Notepad on Life 
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