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Keeping up with the Herods
An apology to anyone who received a round-robin letter
this festive season.
by A S H Smyth
Thursday, January 3, 2008
On hearing that Herod (the Great Amalgam) had ordered
the killing of every Judæan toddler, up to and including those in his own
family, the Emperor Augustus is said to have remarked: ‘Better to be
Herod’s pig than his son.’
I am inclined to agree, and not just because I’m sick of being asked to
test the Smyth family food every evening before it’s given to the Smyth
family pets.
Every year my father sends out a Christmas letter to all our friends and
relations, written – this is the brilliant bit – under the pseudonym of
‘Herod’. Sometimes even ‘Uncle Herod’, if he’s feeling chirpy. It is,
naturellement, full of incisive comment on the year gone by, dry humour
relating to matters international, and amusing punes about things rather
more domestic. His offspring, for example.
To give you an idea of the kind of thing I’m talking about, one of his
(somewhat anachronistic) favourites is the story that Socrates
a) had three sons, and
b) killed himself by drinking hemlock.
Granted, both of these things are true… But it takes a certain
determination to turn coincidence into cause-and-effect (and besides,
the hemlock business was not exactly what most people would consider
a ‘choice’).
I’ll say this for my father’s epistles, though: they’re not boring. And in
the world of round-robin communications, that’s quite an achievement.
They’re not remotely true, either, of course. The reality is that in four
sides of A4 (10pt, Times New Roman) the recipient will learn absolutely
nothing about my family. Leastways nothing flattering. But for all the
slanders and shameless appropriations of other people’s best gags, even
I get a smile out of it, a smile which broadens even as I sign the
documents initiating legal proceedings.
The sole purpose of these missives, of course, is so that my father can
take the piss. It’s no coincidence that he only started producing the
letter once the progeny had reached the age at which they had listened
to enough Goons Shows to gang up on him and make his life a misery.
So now the mischievous bastard spends all year gleefully recording
embarrassing gaffes in his diary, and then much of December making up
shit about us if the gaffes don’t stretch to four pages. It’s hardly the kid-
glove Boswell treatment that serious overachievers like the Smyth boys
feel is their due. Only my mother gets off lightly, and that’s assuming you
ignore the consecutive paragraphs of sarcastic ‘she who must be
obeyed’ references.
Still, this is by-and-large how it should be, I feel.* Especially when you
consider the alternatives: the mealy-mouthed bragging that So-and-So’s
son has made it into Cambridge; the ever-so-self-deprecating anecdotes
about one’s captaincy of the office 5-A-Side soccer team; or the ‘here’s
me with the Dean of Westminster Cathedral at our niece’s first Holy
Communion’ photograph, dropped casually into the body of the text.
And that’s just the ‘successes’ and ‘achievements’. What of the broken
legs, chicken pox and haemorrhoids; the shocking news that your
patently remedial cousin is taking a third consecutive gap-year; or the
year-in-year-out admissions that Whatshername is trying yet another
diet and humiliating herself at weekly yoga classes?
What’s worse, it’s quite clear that when people send you this crap they
actually expect you to read and remember it. I derive a certain black
satisfaction from knowing that the recipients of my father’s letter find
themselves at a total loss, even after they’ve read the letter twice
through. But now that I am approaching Years of Maturity, I’m getting
nightmares over the very real danger that I’ll be cornered at some
ghastly social function and expected to cite chapter and verse about
little Jimmy’s close brush with the deadly sniffles.
More to the point, if all the senders and receivers of group letters are
such good friends (good enough, anyway, that they think everyone
needs to know how their kids fared in their GCSE Design & Technology
coursework), how does it happen that they only communicate once a
year, and are having to tell each other which country their eldest is
saving lepers and/or getting diarrhoea in at the moment? (Haven’t they
heard of Facebook?)
Now, I know damn well that none of you got a copy of this year’s letter,
so apologising for the fact of my father’s ‘mirthful’ Crimbo tendency
would be something of an irrelevance. No, I am here to apologise, on
behalf of the Smyth family, for all Christmas letters starting from the
original Herod’s original decrees. And I want to apologise, specifically,
because it’s my father’s fault.**
The reason I am so apologetic is simple: though he may have picked up
this filthy habit some years back, I now have reason to fear – amongst
his addressees, anyway – that the round-robin contagion is spreading.
This year, for the first time, I realised that we were on the receiving end
of circular letters…
Partly, it was a fluke of efficiency. Normally the Herod annual goes out
around mid-January, by which time none of its recipients feel under any
real obligation to reply: I’d imagine they have a chuckle and then throw
it away as nature intended. But this year the Christmas letter was – to
the astonishment of all the family – actually in the mail in time for
Christmas.
Evidently it caught other people off guard, too, and the flood of hastily-
prepared retaliatory efforts that we received brings us to the crux of the
problem.
There’s an obvious issue here of encroaching acceptability. I remember
fondly a time when decent professional-class folks (the only ones who
matter, since the classes above and below can’t write anyway) would
sooner throw their Olivetti word-processors out of the window that be
caught writing a round-robin. Clearly, every person who writes one –
even one that people don’t think is hilarious and seek to emulate – is
guilty of encouraging the dreadful trend.
Consider the maths. At a conservative estimate my father sends out his
letter to 80 people each year. Of those 80, at least 10 will feel that they
ought to reply. But a combination of guilt (you can’t just write to one of
your friends), laziness (if you’re writing to all your friends you’re hardly
going to do it by hand, are you?) and the belief that round-robins are
now ‘the done thing’ (see above) will mean that these 10 will not just
pen a quick note to the Smyth family and pop it through the door next
time they’re passing. No, no: they will sit down and dredge up four pages
of tedious family news, and e-mail them to all the folks they know.
Sooner or later, one of those folks will be YOU.
So you see, there’s a strong chance that any circular communication you’
ve received in the last decade has been pretty much directly the fault of
my father.
Now, it’s generally accepted that nothing is more contemptible than
someone who whinges from the sidelines but never does anything to
address a bad situation. So, be warned, the princes of the blood are
getting antsy, and 2008 may just be the year for regime change in the
Holy Lands.
Until then, however, being a son in the Herod household is a raw deal.
Someone find me a pig: I want to trade places.
---
* I DO understand why most parents don’t publicly embarrass their
children, of course. They don’t do it because it seriously pisses off the
progeny (and actually other people find it rather odd). There can’t be
many things more annoying that enduring a full-blown middle-class
childhood, replete with urgent demands that you captain this team or
get elected to that society, only to discover that your parents think it’s
poor form to crow about your successes to the neighbours.
** In my defence, he has spent a quarter-century telling me that it
takes a man to apologise when he’s wrong, but a bigger man to apologise
even when he knows he’s in the right. So, here I am…
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
Also by A S H Smyth:
An apology to anyone who received a round-robin letter
this festive season.
by A S H Smyth
Thursday, January 3, 2008
On hearing that Herod (the Great Amalgam) had ordered
the killing of every Judæan toddler, up to and including those in his own
family, the Emperor Augustus is said to have remarked: ‘Better to be
Herod’s pig than his son.’
I am inclined to agree, and not just because I’m sick of being asked to
test the Smyth family food every evening before it’s given to the Smyth
family pets.
Every year my father sends out a Christmas letter to all our friends and
relations, written – this is the brilliant bit – under the pseudonym of
‘Herod’. Sometimes even ‘Uncle Herod’, if he’s feeling chirpy. It is,
naturellement, full of incisive comment on the year gone by, dry humour
relating to matters international, and amusing punes about things rather
more domestic. His offspring, for example.
To give you an idea of the kind of thing I’m talking about, one of his
(somewhat anachronistic) favourites is the story that Socrates
a) had three sons, and
b) killed himself by drinking hemlock.
Granted, both of these things are true… But it takes a certain
determination to turn coincidence into cause-and-effect (and besides,
the hemlock business was not exactly what most people would consider
a ‘choice’).
I’ll say this for my father’s epistles, though: they’re not boring. And in
the world of round-robin communications, that’s quite an achievement.
They’re not remotely true, either, of course. The reality is that in four
sides of A4 (10pt, Times New Roman) the recipient will learn absolutely
nothing about my family. Leastways nothing flattering. But for all the
slanders and shameless appropriations of other people’s best gags, even
I get a smile out of it, a smile which broadens even as I sign the
documents initiating legal proceedings.
The sole purpose of these missives, of course, is so that my father can
take the piss. It’s no coincidence that he only started producing the
letter once the progeny had reached the age at which they had listened
to enough Goons Shows to gang up on him and make his life a misery.
So now the mischievous bastard spends all year gleefully recording
embarrassing gaffes in his diary, and then much of December making up
shit about us if the gaffes don’t stretch to four pages. It’s hardly the kid-
glove Boswell treatment that serious overachievers like the Smyth boys
feel is their due. Only my mother gets off lightly, and that’s assuming you
ignore the consecutive paragraphs of sarcastic ‘she who must be
obeyed’ references.
Still, this is by-and-large how it should be, I feel.* Especially when you
consider the alternatives: the mealy-mouthed bragging that So-and-So’s
son has made it into Cambridge; the ever-so-self-deprecating anecdotes
about one’s captaincy of the office 5-A-Side soccer team; or the ‘here’s
me with the Dean of Westminster Cathedral at our niece’s first Holy
Communion’ photograph, dropped casually into the body of the text.
And that’s just the ‘successes’ and ‘achievements’. What of the broken
legs, chicken pox and haemorrhoids; the shocking news that your
patently remedial cousin is taking a third consecutive gap-year; or the
year-in-year-out admissions that Whatshername is trying yet another
diet and humiliating herself at weekly yoga classes?
What’s worse, it’s quite clear that when people send you this crap they
actually expect you to read and remember it. I derive a certain black
satisfaction from knowing that the recipients of my father’s letter find
themselves at a total loss, even after they’ve read the letter twice
through. But now that I am approaching Years of Maturity, I’m getting
nightmares over the very real danger that I’ll be cornered at some
ghastly social function and expected to cite chapter and verse about
little Jimmy’s close brush with the deadly sniffles.
More to the point, if all the senders and receivers of group letters are
such good friends (good enough, anyway, that they think everyone
needs to know how their kids fared in their GCSE Design & Technology
coursework), how does it happen that they only communicate once a
year, and are having to tell each other which country their eldest is
saving lepers and/or getting diarrhoea in at the moment? (Haven’t they
heard of Facebook?)
Now, I know damn well that none of you got a copy of this year’s letter,
so apologising for the fact of my father’s ‘mirthful’ Crimbo tendency
would be something of an irrelevance. No, I am here to apologise, on
behalf of the Smyth family, for all Christmas letters starting from the
original Herod’s original decrees. And I want to apologise, specifically,
because it’s my father’s fault.**
The reason I am so apologetic is simple: though he may have picked up
this filthy habit some years back, I now have reason to fear – amongst
his addressees, anyway – that the round-robin contagion is spreading.
This year, for the first time, I realised that we were on the receiving end
of circular letters…
Partly, it was a fluke of efficiency. Normally the Herod annual goes out
around mid-January, by which time none of its recipients feel under any
real obligation to reply: I’d imagine they have a chuckle and then throw
it away as nature intended. But this year the Christmas letter was – to
the astonishment of all the family – actually in the mail in time for
Christmas.
Evidently it caught other people off guard, too, and the flood of hastily-
prepared retaliatory efforts that we received brings us to the crux of the
problem.
There’s an obvious issue here of encroaching acceptability. I remember
fondly a time when decent professional-class folks (the only ones who
matter, since the classes above and below can’t write anyway) would
sooner throw their Olivetti word-processors out of the window that be
caught writing a round-robin. Clearly, every person who writes one –
even one that people don’t think is hilarious and seek to emulate – is
guilty of encouraging the dreadful trend.
Consider the maths. At a conservative estimate my father sends out his
letter to 80 people each year. Of those 80, at least 10 will feel that they
ought to reply. But a combination of guilt (you can’t just write to one of
your friends), laziness (if you’re writing to all your friends you’re hardly
going to do it by hand, are you?) and the belief that round-robins are
now ‘the done thing’ (see above) will mean that these 10 will not just
pen a quick note to the Smyth family and pop it through the door next
time they’re passing. No, no: they will sit down and dredge up four pages
of tedious family news, and e-mail them to all the folks they know.
Sooner or later, one of those folks will be YOU.
So you see, there’s a strong chance that any circular communication you’
ve received in the last decade has been pretty much directly the fault of
my father.
Now, it’s generally accepted that nothing is more contemptible than
someone who whinges from the sidelines but never does anything to
address a bad situation. So, be warned, the princes of the blood are
getting antsy, and 2008 may just be the year for regime change in the
Holy Lands.
Until then, however, being a son in the Herod household is a raw deal.
Someone find me a pig: I want to trade places.
---
* I DO understand why most parents don’t publicly embarrass their
children, of course. They don’t do it because it seriously pisses off the
progeny (and actually other people find it rather odd). There can’t be
many things more annoying that enduring a full-blown middle-class
childhood, replete with urgent demands that you captain this team or
get elected to that society, only to discover that your parents think it’s
poor form to crow about your successes to the neighbours.
** In my defence, he has spent a quarter-century telling me that it
takes a man to apologise when he’s wrong, but a bigger man to apologise
even when he knows he’s in the right. So, here I am…
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
Also by A S H Smyth:
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