AIBU to really dislike Round Robin updates in Christmas Cards?

[ShinyRuby]

I mean the printed list of family achievements that some people insist on putting inside their cards. I had one today, a printed A4 sheet from someone who I haven't seen for a number of years. It had a paragraph for each member of the family detailing all their achievements over the year. I just found it all so very boastful & braggy. Obviously there's never anything negative &, reading between the lines, the achievements seemed to be no more than any average family. I know the letters go to literally everybody she knows. I can't see the need but maybe IABU. Anyway, it went straight into the recycling!

We only get one. It's from friends we haven't seen for years. It's filled with things that are just so unimportant to anyone else and bare absolutely no relation to us about people we have never meet. I did actually do one one year when I felt we had had a particularly bad year. Both Fil and Mil had died in the same year, I had had a pacemaker put I and had been very ill and my mum had cancer. Thought it might have stopped the mundane drivel we got but no still got another one the next year!

Can't remember what I was searching for but this came up so bumping it as it's that time of year again.

Can't wait!

OK its an old thread, but ....
we receive a few.
One from DH old pal whose wife hates everyone- so no idea why she sends us one. Little Ophelia has won 99 gymkhana things and is going to enter the Olympics. Next year...Ophelia has decided horses are not for her, but is winning many awards for new passion of dancing. Next year- dancing not on agenda and so on..

The kind of sad one- an old pal of mine. V V religious. Church and related activities feature very heavily. Her daughter came out as transgender and will now be know as Will. Heavily curtailed the religious spiel. But happily seems to be supporting said child.

Final one is a photo montage, of people I do not know (with maybe one pic of friend). Alistair (who) skiing in Val d'Isere. Sophie (who?) scaling mount Kilimanjaro with 40 orphans in her backpack. It sets Christmas off well.

I sent out a fake one to close family members last year, detailing a bunch of fabricated exploits and achievements.

I have a feeling it might become a regular thing

Sadly I've never received one of these round Robins. Sounds hilarious though!

I sensed sadness behind the letter from a lady I used to work with. She and her husband were stalwants of the 'Leicester astronomical scene' and he was keeping himself busy in retirement by 'writing letters to various officials' after some building work went horribly wrong.

This is spoof from a book I was given 25 years ago . We used to receive some stickers until I sent this one with the blanks filled in.

Read "The Cat that could open the Fridge" by Simon Hoggart. He gets sent thousands of these round robins each year and has compiled two (perhaps more now!) books on the subject. Perfect stocking filler.

Awww! Come on - they're brilliant!

As the proud owner of a new grandson I think I'll have to start doing one myself.

@Lysianthus
One of my cats can open the fridge and it's a bloody nuisance, because he shares the contents with the dog and the other cats. Seriously!

I like them, I like hearing from my friends and what they have done in the last year. (Obviously not the boastful messages). To me it’s much nicer to have a resume at Christmas rather than continual posting on FB (which I never use). I don’t send them myself but I do individually write a few lines on Christmas cards to share news (& I love sending and receiving Christmas cards ).

I know this is an old thread but since it’s been resurrected I’m going to add to it

My mum receives a RR from a family member, it’s different every year but on the same theme. It’s always a double sided sheet of a4 scripting the argument him and his wife have about how they need to write the RR.
Think “it’s december already, have you started writing the newsletter?”
“No, anything you want me to
“Gosh you’re so disorganised. You probably would even forget to say our darling son has bought a new

Im waiting for the year the letter reads “just get on with it you complete dickhead”

They’re a useful way of weeding out acquaintances with no sense of irony whatsoever.

Though a cherished Christmas tradition used to be the annual RR from an old school friend of my father’s, who liked detail and was famously penny-pinching. So we would get exactly how much he weighed before he went on holiday and after he got home, the exchange rate between sterling and the Swiss franc, how much the hotel had cost and how the breakfast was so big they never needed to waste money on lunch, how many steps he’d done each day around Geneva, how much of a refund his daughter got on a faulty cooker etc etc. A particular highlight one year was a headcount of how many dog turds he’d seen between his hotel and the Acropolis.

Sitickers= STINKERS

I love a RR me!
We get one every year from a couple we haven't seen in a decade. We used to visit them and they were sooo precious about their DC. They would throw us out early to keep to a routine for them to the minute but....over the years it was evident that both kids were going off the rails massively. My spidey senses tingles a couple of years ago when the activities of both DC were being alluded to in slightly less gushing terms. I stalked the DC on FB and it is clear that they are both into some really weird stuff. All the routines in the world and they went the way they went!
I would have some sympathy for them if the RRs over the years from them had been less sneery and keep up with the Joneses but I can't help but smile to myself as each year they try and find more an more ludicrous ways to explain away their DC's behaviour which was criminal in the case of one of them.

Actually I like them it keeps people upto date with the goings on.

The Janet and Roy threads were utter brilliance.

They are dreadful! It just feels like being stuck in a lift with someone and talked at.

There is no thought given to the recipients as individuals. Not even a 'how are you?' in most.

The people going through money problems, infertility, a break-up, physical or mental health problems might just prefer not to receive a smug message from someone who knows you will be 'pleased for them' on their 'well deserved' lottery win, 'well deserved' series of luxury holidays, how their 'well deserved' partner only has to wink and they conceive 'well deserved' quads, how 'everything happens for a reason' and how if only people would 'think positive', join their pyramid scheme or climb Everest for the cat pamper party foundation, they would enjoy 'well deserved' prosperity, good health and self-absorption.

I love them. We have a game where we write a list of people places and activities before we read them. Think the Hoff, Antarctica and lion taming and as we read the letters we replace their items with ours. Eg. Little Jonny enjoy scout camp this year particularly the raft building becomes..... Little Jonny enjoyed deepest darkest Peru this year particularly the pole dancing. Etc etc. The really funny ones strike the right balance between being bonkers but somehow plausible.

We often send one!! I try to be humble, witty and brief, and I include a couple of photos (must confess to selecting ones that I like of me!). I usually add a couple of handwritten lines at the bottom. I put it inside the cards that I send to people we haven’t seen for a while (we moved to another part of the country for DH job so friends and family are widely scattered). Also send it to the oldies who like to see how DD has turned out. I see it as being a lot less awful than constant bragging on Facebook!

I get one from a friend of a friend and I love it. I don't think it's braggy at all though this round robin contains a mixture of both the highs and some of the lows and some funny things.

You don't have to read it.

For years my late DH and I composed a spoof one (but with real opinions), but what we found was that it meant the real stuff our lives was missed out. No-one knew what our DC or we did. I maintain the traditional spoof, but slightly padded wiht real info.

OP, put it in the bin by all means, but for myself, I now treasure everyone whoever can be arsed sending me a card/letter.round robin. At last they make the effort.

What do you send, that's authentic?

MrsNoMopp Brilliant!

I have a FB 'friend' and she frequently puts crap like this. Having a well deserved hot chocolate. Having a well deserved holiday to Bali. Self congratulations for putting the bins out and living a normal life. She's no Nobel Prize winner ffs.

Whoever called it post and boast has it! This is the problem with them - they’re usually not about keeping people up to date, they’re about showing off. You never see “Steve missed out on the promotion he was hoping for, Claire got an average bunch of GCSEs and Ella scraped through her grade 1 violin by the skin of her teeth”. It’s all “look at us, our life’s amazing”. Which is, frankly, tedious....

I love reading the ones my folks get. I like to read them aloud in a broad Suffolk accent.