Snobbery, mulled and spiced

“This waking is the shortest day
The rest is timeless sleep —
There’s only one appointment
The living have to keep...”
From Curling Toes by Bachchoo

The e-Christmas started coming a week before the 25th, rather defeating the point of instant ethereal messaging. Written cards are harder to send. One has to choose the card that expresses your personality, pose or preoccupation, write out each name and try and remember if they are still married to or partnered with the same person, find the postal address and put it on the envelope and then go to the post office, queue up for an hour because the local shop has run out of stamps, stick the stamps and get to the box. Took me hours and cost lots.

The e-Christmas card may be faster but it announces that the sender has paid nothing for it and simply clicked “send to all” and felt the glow of being sooo
contemporary.
So I was surprised to hear the UK Post Office’s estimate that the invention of email and then e-cards has coincided with a greater and not fewer number of written and posted Christmas greetings. My own experience sort of confirms this. I got 10 times as many posted cards as I did “e” ones. It’s the same logic for the written word. More books have been sold since TV and the Internet were invented.
Some of the e-cards were animated and entertaining and all were Christmas-themed. The posted ones did, for the large part, have the manger, the crib, sheep and shepherds, the three Parsis with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh and stars over Bethlehem. Some, with a more sketchy sense of geography, had snow in West Asia.
Then there were the St. Nicholas ones with reindeer and sleighs and wishes for merriment and good cheer. But there were also secular cards and one which portrayed a very satisfied-looking British county couple celebrating Christmas and saying they felt sorry for the people who had to live in terraced houses. A snobbery joke and very Brit.
The first of my favourite stories of Christmas snobbery with a good dash of racism and some flavouring of imperialism involved is that of Queen Victoria’s servant Abdul Karim. He was sent from Agra on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee as a “present” to serve at table at her palaces.
Abdul wheedled his way into the Queen’s favour by exciting her curiosity about the Urdu words which he threw into the limited interaction his duties at table entailed, calling her “Malika muazzama” which made her ask what it meant and whether it was “Hindoo”. He told her it was Urdu and meant Empress and she asked for more words and then invited him to give her lessons in the
language.
Karim began the lessons and over the weeks grew quite close to her. She relieved him of menial duties and gave him the designation of “Munshi”, which he thought entitled him to enter the billiard room of the palace and have a game with the gentlemen of the royal entourage. They treated him as an upstart and declined to have any social contact with him at any level, even though the Queen made it known that he should be treated with respect.
Karim, in imitation of what he saw the Queen and the household doing, bought and sent out Christmas cards to the Viceroy of India, the governors of the provinces, judges, generals and to the British Cabinet. The cards were returned unopened. These personages refused to accept a greeting card from someone they thought of as an Indian serving man.
The Munshi must have been distressed by the insulting rebuff but pretended to the Queen that he was merely puzzled. Victoria ordered her high and mighty to accept and acknowledge the poor Munshi’s greetings. The process must have taken weeks and one can imagine what the likes of Lord Salisbury and Lady Elgin would have thought while complying.
The second Christmas story is more recent and the bewilderment is caused by a foible of class rather than race or rank:
William Whitelaw was Margaret Thatcher’s Deputy Prime Minister and was later created Viscount with a hereditary peerage. Norman Lamont was Thatcher’s Chancellor (finance minister). One Christmas Lamont went into a wine shop in London’s King’s Cross area, chose some wine and attempted to pay using his personal credit card. The card was refused.
The shop assistant recognised Lamont and after he had paid for the wine with cash, phoned the newspapers with his scoop of a story — that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had had his personal credit card refused on a small purchase. The newspapers ran the story angled at the irony of
someone who couldn’t manage his own finances running those of the country.
A further point, hinted at but not explored in the article, was that King’s Cross is a notorious
red light district and what the hell was Norman Lamont doing buying relatively cheap bottles of wine there?
The story came immediately to the notice of the Cabinet and apart from the embarrassment was the cause of a lot of amusement. Whitelaw was puzzled.
“What’s all this about Norman?” he asked his parliamentary secretary, who told him the story.
“What do you mean he went to buy some wine?” asked Whitelaw. “You mean you can actually walk into a shop and buy wine?”
The Deputy Prime Minister was genuinely unaware that wine didn’t arrive, as it probably did
onto his table via his cellar, through orders placed for cases of it with one’s favourite chateau or vintner.
The other such remark from Thatcher’s Tory government came from Alan Clark who was asked, when Thatcher’s hold on office came into question, what he thought of Michael Heseltine
who was in the running to succeed her.
“The Heseltines? They are the kind of people who have to buy their own furniture!” The snob’s putdown of those who don’t inherit theirs.