Joyce Fegan: There’s something sacrosanct about Christmas cards

"In a world where you can fly off a message of a goodwill with the flick of your thumb on your channel of choice, WhatsApp, Facebook or old school text, there is something now sacrosanct about the Christmas card, especially the Covid Christmas card"

A handwritten Christmas card also has the effect of bringing you to your senses.

I pored over my mother's Christmas cards for hours. There'd be dozens of them. I was meticulous in my inspection. I loved the unusual ones, making sure to see who the sender of those were. I'd be unimpressed by the ones with the singular robin on the cover or the ones with the less stiff card.

I'd count how many matched, disappointed that not every card was unique. And I always read the messages inside, a bit annoyed when there was nothing but an illegible sign-off, why send a card if you're not even going to bother writing a note? And I'd be more than intrigued by the long elaborate letters on some, though they were rare. They came from nursing college friends of my mother or else a fella in Canada from my father's Dublin youth. I enquired as to who these people were, and in doing so, accidentally got to know my parents' better - discovering the people they were before they were parents.