For years we used to design and print our own Forest Christmas card.
One year it featured Santa Claus smoking a cigar in a garden shed. The next he was on a sleigh, in space, hurtling towards a welcoming smoker-friendly planet.
My favourite card featured a typical Christmas scene - log fire, Christmas stockings, plus a handful of boxes in plain wrapping featuring the slogan ‘Hands off our presents'.
On the back was an illustration of a sludge brown cracker with a further message: ‘Plain packaging? You must be crackers'.
The Times’ Business Diary applauded us for "mustering some Christmas spirit" in our fight against plain packaging and reproduced both the front and back of the card.
Back then we sent hundreds of cards to MPs, broadcasters and journalists, and each one had to be signed.
It took the best part of a day but we fortified ourselves with wine and mince pies to alleviate the boredom and reduce the risk of repetitive strain injury.
In December 2009, in an article headlined ‘The pubs that died after giving up smoking’, Telegraph columnist Vicki Woods wrote:
In a year when the postman brought me fewer handwritten, stamped and posted Christmas cards, the corporate ones stood out. I liked a depressed Santa sitting under a pub sign saying NOBODY'S INN. It was a Merry Christmas from Forest (the pro-smoking people), hand-signed in different biros by Nicky, Sue x and Squiggle.
Squiggle? That was me!
This year, given the ever increasing price of stamps, we decided not to design, print and post an exclusive card to hundreds of recipients (many of whom may not even be working in an office any more) but to recycle a previous design and email it to the 3,800 names on our mailing list.
It’s not the same, I know, and it’s sad that the long tradition of sending Christmas cards in the post appears to be coming to an end, but there we go.
I still send personal Christmas cards to a handful of relatives and friends I haven’t seen in a long time, but the list gets smaller and smaller each year and I’ve noticed that fewer still send us a card in return.
We’ve received one or two digital cards but while I appreciate the thought you can’t put it on the mantlepiece (even if you have one).
The upside is that we no longer have to suffer the round-robin Christmas letter that was briefly in vogue a decade or so ago.
To be fair, one or two were a source of great merriment in our household, but the general response was one of bitter jealousy that our ‘friends’ had enjoyed such a full year with numerous holidays on sun-kissed shores.
As for their children, I had zero interest in hearing about their first class degree, their ‘amazing’ gap year in South America, or their wonderful new job.
If that makes me a curmudgeon, I’m sorry!
PS. There was a time when I would receive the odd (sometimes very odd) corporate gift from a supplier or business contact.
More often than not the present was an executive toy - a stress ball (‘for mind and body’) or Newton’s cradle - but occasionally I would get something rather more desirable, a few bottles of wine, perhaps.
Funnily enough, the most enduring corporate gift I have ever received was a little red address book I was given as a leaving present in December 1982.
I still have it and two years ago I wrote about it here.
Below: The 2009 Forest Christmas card adapted a stock photo to highlight the impact the smoking ban was having on Britain’s pubs
