Give round robin Christmas letters over Instagram smugness

Once upon a festive season, opening your Christmas post would induce a blizzard of folded-up A4 paper, as a slew of round robin letters floated out from cards.

- Katie Rosseinsky, The Independent

These carefully typed missives, adorned with a few choice sprigs of yuletide clip art and some pixellated photos, brought with them glad tidings — and (not-so) humblebrags aplenty. Blame the rise of the home computer and its partner in crime, the desktop printer. As they became more common from the 1990s onwards, these two simple pieces of tech made it all too easy to share the minutiae of the author's year on a grand scale.