A round of applause for a mocked festive tradition

The round robin was once a festive failsafe, but has sadly died out. Now that oversharing and humble bragging are rife on social media, Katie Rosseinsky asks if it's time to revive them

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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. 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.

No longer would we have to pick up a biro and painstakingly write out their updates by hand; instead, we could craft a onesize-fits-all message for mass distribution to even the most distant of family members and the most tenuous of acquaintances.

Each page would be crammed with family updates that tended to be banal, boastful or some unholy mixture of the two. You could sigh in sympathy, for example, as you learned that Derek had finally reached platinum status on his airline of choice, only to be left bereft by the declining quality of the in-flight meals in business class.

His wife, Sandra, meanwhile, had her annual weekend away with "the girls" blighted by rail cancellations due to an excess of leaves on the line in the Milton Keynes area. Cue a thrilling indepth analysis of all the labyrinthine twists and turns of the ticket return process, before the next paragraph cut seamlessly to their son Max, who had managed to master conversational Mandarin with a level of speed, fluency and downright panache never before seen by an eight-year-old, according to his tutor.