This should be year 9 of my Analysis of the Christmas Cards series where I think of as many different ways as I can to categorise the cards we receive then choose and photograph my favourite ones before chucking them all away and saying goodbye to Christmas before it rolls round again. But the number of cards we get is on the decline, and either I’m getting bored of them or the cards themselves are becoming more boring - less homemade, disfigured by ugly written slogans (for example season’s greetings) with even a couple of duplicates or repeats from previous years. I’d already decided I wasn’t going to bother with the analysis when I visited my Aunt Gillian’s house and saw a christmas card display that was better than any I’d seen for ages and therefore worth counting up then quickly sorting into some basic categories.
Around the sitting room, birds on the mantlepiece.
The cards, already sorted into loose categories, stand on every surface in the sitting room. There are so many, about 100, that they spill out into other rooms. I missed a whole group on the windowsill (the curtains were drawn) that excitingly included a triangular card, there is also an octagonal one in the religious corner (shown below left). These have been included in the final shape statistics which are as follows and roughly as usual: 55% square, 22% portrait, 22% landscape, 2% other.
The religious corner, small ones on the bookshelf.
Two more chests in the sitting room.
Into the hall and the kitchen where we find some of Gillian’s favourites (I think her number one is the hare staring at the moon).
I had to choose a favourite quickly, and went for the Selwyn Image mistletoe, oak and robin design displayed on the mantlepiece and shown below. Gillian said she liked all the bird cards, which make up 25% of the whole collection, with other favourites on the card display bar in the kitchen. These include two wonderful buildings shown below and the ever popular mysterious Christmas hare.
My favourites: two buildings and two robins by Selwyn Image and Gertrude Hermes (the last two are Ashmolean Museum cards).