by Krullix

Created on: October 03, 2008

Isn't Christmas wonderful? Isn't it a magical time of fattening geese and figgy puddings? A time when goodwill, peace and love is spread throughout the land to one and all? When the joyous message of Jesus is spread to children through the medium of the Nintendo Wii? Well, no it isn't, actually. Christmas for many is stressful, miserable and a plunge into uncontrollable, spiralling debt. But the sending and receiving of Christmas cards has nothing to do with this, has it? How can I argue against a gesture which lets people know someone is in their thoughts? Well, firstly, I would suggest that for many, the sending of Christmas cards is a mechanical, annual process; something that needs to be done out of duty, rather than a genuine desire to maintain contact with acquaintances and friends. It may boost a person's self-esteem to have festive greetings cards adorning every wall of their house but isn't this illusion of companionship a mere pretence of popularity?

And then there are the Dear Friend' letters. The endless pages of A4 containing a year's worth of mediocrity from acquaintances you can barely remember. I don't know what motivates people to annually scribble down a commentary on the most banal details of their egocentric lives.

Putting my humbugs to one side for a moment, there is a more serious downside to the sending of Christmas cards, and that is the environmental impact. In the UK the Royal Mail delivers approximately 150 million cards a day in the pre-Christmas period. It is estimated that 1 billion of these cards will end up in landfill sites. That equates to 17 cards per man, woman and child weighing in at 20,000 tonnes. To make the cards and envelopes, 200,000 trees will be cut down.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg of yuletide excess. Eighty three square kilometres of wrapping paper will end up in UK bins this Christmas, enough to cover an area larger than Guernsey. It is claimed that the carbon emissions from the Christmas lights that stretch for two miles in London's West End would take a forest of 215 trees 100 years to "offset". Even the traditional Christmas dinner has a negative impact on the environment. Academics at The University of Manchester have worked out that the turkey and trimmings enjoyed at millions of Christmas dinner tables will have a carbon equivalent to 6,000 car journeys around the world. Add to all this the increase in flights, as people fly to be with family and loved ones, and it is easy to see that Christmas

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