Is anyone else still sending Round Robin Christmas letters

[Iwasneveragoddess]

Or is it just my sister, speaking about the whole family in the third person.....?

God I hate them ....

My parents used to send one mocked up like the front of a newspaper

My sisters is a card which folds out into a letter 😆

I have been receiving one for the previous owners of my house for a good sixteen years now (clearly close). I feel like I know Graham and Sue and the kids intimately

The “engine room” of the family 😂😂

My sister writes for our whole family a spoof one that is totally hilarious.

I now want to write one so I can describe myself as the 'engine room' of the family, that's brilliant and so military

We receive one where the mum of the family writes it from her sons perspective - except son is now 18 and likely has no idea she is writing the letter as him. She goes into far too much detail about their lives and the lives of cousins and close friends around. It is the cringiest thing you could ever read. He would need the ground to swallow him up if he knew this existed and especially now as it mentions his relationship etc. Awful!

What would the tone need to be to make it not cringe? I've debated doing one as we've moved abroad and rarely on FB so it feels like a nice way to share what we've been up to. DS is 2 so not quite old enough to brag about his academic achievements

I'd really like to have an update of what friends and family have been up to. I'd like the odd bragging one too for amusement!

I really enjoy reading them, but you’d need to be insufferable to write them.

We get one every year from an ex-colleague whose brother is a well-known Tory MP with a mildly scandalous past. Always look forward to the family photos although the rest of it is very dull

I send them, and make an effort to keep it short, and to keep the tone light. I aspire to be as witty and self-deprecating as those received from an old friend - hers are ace!

I send them only to people we haven't seen during the year. I even keep old ones, because they bring back memories.

Better a cringey round robin, though, than the card I received from an old friend. Our families used to be close, visiting each other often. We've drifted apart, as evidenced by the card containing a photo of 2 children on the front, all professionally printed including the greeting inside and their names ... I assume the children are her 2 grandchildren . But to not even sign your own name by hand ... sheesh, we should be grateful to have received a card at all clearly!!

I'm guilty of the printed card including printed signing thing. It's often the only way they let you do it on websites for card creating, unless you had them all delivered to your house first so you could sign them all I suppose. But this doesn't make sense for us to do as we live abroad and use a UK site to send them to UK relatives so that the postage isn't insanely expensive. I thought it was quite a nice way to get photos to older relatives who don't use Facebook and may have expected a card... feel a bit sad they might have been offended by it now

We get a few of these every year.
The vicars is awful, in last years he and his wife mused with dismay at how they were coming to terms with their sons sexuality.

I get two each year, but they're both really good and I look forward to receiving them. One is from a friend who lives abroad and has moved around a lot, and has an amazing network of friends around the world - and it is more about his encounters with the country he is currently living in than the day to day details of his life. It actually comes around in early January as an email and he always offers us the option of opting out from future editions.. The second one is from a couple who I don't see as much as I'd like, but they both write very well and is usually the highlights of their life and that of their teenage children - it usually makes me laugh out loud at least once.

My SIL used to send some belters, always themed. One was written as a pastiche of Peter Mayles 'Toujours Provence' (she's not French), another in the first person from her daughter (a baby at the time).

They stopped abruptly when her husband buggered off.

@StCharlotte The other was from a couple, the husband of whom was in the navy so there was a bit about [cutesy nickname for wife] continuing to be the "engine room" of the family - and their gifted and talented children natch.

That opens her up to some jokes about stoking the boiler, surely?

I write a few lines on the inside of some of my cards. I hardly send any these days, just to older relatives who expect them. I try to be honest and a bit self deprecating, no exam grade boasting or anything like that.

I've had a bit of a shitty year this year and I kind of said that in so many words.

It's hard to strike a balance between not coming off as a smug twat, or a sulking woe-is-me type, particularly as the people I am writing to may be facing much worse.

As we don't send many cards I get few back, so I never get round robins. I feel a bit deprived and have to live vicariously through you lot.

My mother used to get an hilariously smug one from the same family every year. Pretty much all the children had really silly names, and of course were all high achievers.

This reminds me of a friend of my Mums who she never saw anymore. She never sent letters, but one year her husband was absent from the card - the first we heard of her splitting up. Then he was missing for another year, and in the third year there was a totally new blokes name in the card who we had never heard of.

It was like a mystery in three parts.

Round Robins used to be my actual favourite thing about Christmas! I found them hilarious.

I really miss the Boast-by- Posts, especially when people are too dim to realise that you have other sources of information about them. The best was one bragging about her husband's promotion, we knew that her husband had caught her in flagrante with his boss and the promotion was to keep her husband quiet!

What the hell is a round robin?
I can’t be the only one - surely?!

I've never sent them, I might write a note to enclose in a card if I have something relevant to say to the recipient. I've received a few this year and haven't read them yet.

We don't get many RRs, as our friends mostly do Facebook these days. My mum gets quite a few, which I eagerly look forward to reading. My favourite is the evangelical Christian family where the daughter was miraculously cured of some sort of unmentionable women's problem ("the surgeon himself said it was a miracle"). Meanwhile the eldest son at university had brought his girlfriend home to visit, who coincidentally was born on the due date of a baby who was sadly miscarried by his mother a couple of months before she became pregnant with said eldest son. The mum and dad believed she was some sort of gift from God and had adopted her (can you even adopt adults? What about her own parents? Doesn't that make the relationship incestuous?)

I was absolutely dying to see how this was going to play out over the coming years - what if the son and his "adopted" sister split up? What if she decided the whole lot were completely bonkers and went no contact with them?

Unfortunately I have never seen another Round Robin from this particular family again; my mum swears blind that they stopped sending cards that year. Either a) my mum is hiding them because she was horrified by my piss-taking or b) they genuinely stopped writing them after 20+ years. I'm gutted that it appears that I will never know what happened

I think it depends upon what you think of the person in question....

A handwritten Christmas letter is lovely, especially if from a friend, a much-loved relative, or someone else you don't get to see as much as you'd like.

It's the round-robin style letters from people you're only acquainted with that ramble on for 6 pages (yes 6!!) about how wonderful they are and how all-round fab their life is. I noticed tonight one such acquaintance published her annual 6 pager on Facebook - that desperate is she for acknowledgement and approval of her life, choices and achievements. What surprises me is that people are happy to 'like' these types of posts. My reaction was to snooze her for 30 more days

They are very wanky

A relative who lives in the US sent them to us for years. A proper newspaper type thing all about his fab house and the new alterations, his partner, states visited etc Sounds really interesting but all done in a boastful way. Dsis and I used to laugh over it. We haven't had one for a few years now because he is too busy earning his millions.

Simon Hoggart's collections of round robins are joyous. Skewers the different types and range of horrendous boasting beautifully. I dip into them every year as part of my festive warm up.

I don't really understand the motivations of the writers though, especially in the era of ubiquitous email, plus social media (I understand not everyone does the latter). If someone doesn't know you well enough to keep up at least loosely through the year, and therefore know you've had another baby / moved house / joined the ukele orchestra of Great Britain, why would they want to know, and why would you want to tell them?

Mind you, I don't really understand the phenomenon of acquaintances, or making a lot of effort for them. Actual friends, absolutely, but as above they know what I'm up to. That pleasant woman I met on a course 10 years ago but haven't seen since? No. What's the point?!