I am writing Christmas cards. Every year I resolve to write them early; every year I end up harassed by the last-posting dates. I don’t tend to give cards to people I see in the ‘here and now’. My list is almost entirely a ritual of recalling the past, my past. Such as: two college friends I haven’t seen for over forty years. They weren’t my closest friends, but we met in the first week and three years later we graduated together; they were reliable and stable. The fact of their continuing to participate each year in this small, trivial exchange provides reassurance of something.

Nostalgia and reminiscence cause me to send cards to our neighbours in Hampshire. Writing their addresses, I visualise the road, a mere eight houses set in a U-shaped cul-de-sac. Memory prompts with the gradient of the slope, the texture of the neighbour’s fence at the bottom, the angle I needed to turn the steering wheel to put my little car on the drive. For fourteen years, such habitual things.

The cards are vectors, they travel across the country and stretch into my past. The web they build locates me in time and space.

I send a card to the neighbours of my parents, whom I do not really know and I wonder if the real reason I do this is for the sheer pleasure of writing their address. Just one digit different, a minor slip of the pen, and I would be writing my first address again. The one which was written in pencil in books, at that age when town and county are not enough and we are driven to continue ‘United Kingdom, Europe, The World, The Solar System, The Universe’. That age when we somehow start to wrestle with identity and perspective: I am, uniquely, me; I am just one tiny dot in infinity. When I left for university, my dad wrote to me. He wrote every week, quiet, unemotional letters about nothing very much. Every week. On Tuesday mornings I would go to the porter’s lodge and receive this bland reassurance that home was going on, steadily, safely without me. Still there. And, dutifully, every week I replied. What did I write? What my weekly essay had been about, people I had met, I cannot remember now. Every week I would write my own address on an envelope and send it home. I now look back and see that, with those letters, whether we intended it or not, we somehow comforted each other and, as I get older, I increasingly believe that comfort is always welcome. Giving ease and giving strength – the ‘fort’ part of comfort is from the Latin fortis, strength. As I get older, I increasingly believe that we need ease and strength.

As a child I went through a now slightly embarrassing phase of sending myself a postcard when we were on holiday. It now feels a strange thing to have done, yet perhaps it’s characteristic – an early sign of that tendency to reach out to myself as if to a third person, with an odd, dispassionate tenderness, and give slightly clumsy, over-articulated validation. So we would return to a missive from my past self, assuring me that I had had a lovely holiday.

Perhaps, even then, I was enchanted by the post. I still feel there is something faintly miraculous about the postal service. I remain amazed at what is being offered: I cannot think of the post without recalling the educational children’s programme which tracked a letter from post box to destination (Come Outside, since you ask) and the classic ‘Night Mail’ (the poem starts at about 20:25 if you want to skip to that bit). When the post office clerk tells me the (ever increasing) cost of sending a parcel, I find myself saying “that’s fine. Someone is going to take it all the way to” – to wherever, to Sheffield, to Northumberland, to Wiltshire, Cambridgeshire, Sussex – “and take it to the very house of this person. How can you put a price on that?” I have a habit of sending small, ridiculous, unexpected items, such as a favourite packet of biscuits, so the cost of postage is very often far more than the value of the package. But I feel that more is being conveyed than just the package. My dad’s letters were not very interesting, individually they were rarely significant, but he wrote them, to me, every week. He never forgot me.

With this growing pile of Christmas cards, I love the tangibility of them. In this increasingly virtual world, I like the slow, slightly shabby actuality of a bit of card, sometimes creased, rain-spattered, with the mild risk of mis-direction or loss. I like that Christmas card designs are repetitive: rural winter landscapes which bear no relation to our real surroundings, cute and vaguely amusing animals. The very familiarity is security and blurs time reassuringly. I write a card to you now, because I knew you then. I remember with gratitude, I send good wishes.

This year, the task has felt particularly burdensome. I am less confident in the relationships; I am less comfortable with my past.  I don’t want to misrepresent myself. I know I am over-thinking it. Christmas cards are essentially moderate. They are not the place for angst. They are the place for tradition, reassurance and gentle positivity. After all, we use them to look to the future. We wish each other a merry Christmas and share, as if putting it into words might help make it happen, the hope of a happy new year.