Christmas cards are the pits, aren’t they? A positive engine of seasonal ill-will. They take hours to do, if you do them properly, and wing across the country (and have you checked the price of a stamp lately?) to be received by people you like but don’t see, or people you see but don’t like – and to find themselves consigned to the recycling bin, in many cases, within thirty seconds of being opened. You feel guilty when you get a card from people you failed to send one to; and resentful when you don’t get a card from people you remembered to send one to.

It strikes me, though, that we civilians have it positively easy on the Christmas card front. Imagine what it must be like being a member of the royal family. It’s enough to cause pity to well in the heart of even the most fervent of republicans. If you’re the King or the Prince of Wales, you have to send hundreds and hundreds of the wretched things. Thousands, probably: many to people you actively loathe and institutions you’ve barely any memory of being involved with. More than that, you’re expected to lose what I imagine will be a full day of your life to a professional photoshoot: not for you, unfortunately, the bumper pack of Oxfam cards decorated with a generic robin redbreast.

If you’re the King or the Prince of Wales, you have to send hundreds and hundreds of the wretched things

Then, which is even worse, the moment the first one lands on the first doorstep, they are all over the papers. Your choice of clothes, your expression, the setting, the arrangement of your family in the frame: these things are parsed for meaning with the sort of hermeneutic energy otherwise only reserved for the discovery of some long-lost gnostic gospel turned up in a dig in Alexandria.

So, this year, we were informed at some length that the Prince and Princess of Wales were projecting ‘undone glamour’ in this year’s seasonal snap. Undone glamour? No, me neither. Implies a magic spell that’s been disenchanted, or a 1940s actress after a casting couch incident, if you ask me. Or maybe it means that they’re looking glamorous but have the top buttons of their shirts loose, which is sort of the case here. I mean, it’s a perfectly normal family photograph, or as perfectly normal as a professionally styled black-and-white family photograph of a Prince and Princess of Wales is likely to look. The couple are smiling. Their three kids are smiling. Everyone’s in a matchy-matchy pale shirt and jeans. The kids are in plimsolls. HRH has his sleeves rolled halfway up his forearm.

Yes, yes, but what does it mean? Could it be that in channeling ordinary folk – who are presumed to appear in photographs without ties – it’s a sign that the future of the monarchy is in reforming hands? Or is it, as one critic earnestly contended, ‘a visual powerplay that attempts to bring some of the gloss that has been lacking from the monarchy in recent years back to public view’? Or is it a brazen challenge to the Montecito cool of the estranged brother and sister-in-law? Another such critic: ‘there is one California couple, all too eager to show their warts of late, that this can’t help but seem like a reference to. What new front this Christmas vibe-snatching opens up in the war between the brothers and their wives is anyone’s guess.’

Comparisons are, of course, made to the parental Christmas card, which came out on the same day. His Majesty wasn’t having any of that unbuttoned glamour stuff. He appeared with the Queen, photographed in full colour, positively festooned with Royal bling: coronation tunic and robe of estate, topped for monsieur with the Imperial State Crown and for madame with Queen Mary’s Crown. There’s all manner of gold-trimmed, red velvet swag in the background and it looks as if they‘re standing in great pools of fabric as their robes spill past them and down two or three steps in front. Very much not your classic ordinary folk family snap.

So, is Prince William’s unbuttoned look a shocking challenge to his father’s traditionalism? Or is this a carefully co-ordinated one-two punch drawn up by the Way Ahead Group – showing the younger generation that Princes of Wales can be groovy while reassuring older monarchists that there are still plenty of crowns and diamonds in the Buck House dressing-up box?

Me, I think that we can and should apply Occam’s razor to the problem. They’re just sodding Christmas cards. The King is a stuffy old thing, and he’s also the King, so you can expect him to have a slightly stuffy Christmas photo, and that’s cool. The Prince of Wales is a Sloane Ranger married to another Sloane Ranger, and he’s in his early forties, so he’s likely to look a bit more Boden catalogue than his seventy-something dad. If either of them wanted to send an important message to the public, or to their estranged relatives on the other side of the Atlantic, there are easier ways to do it than through the medium of highly ambiguous fashion statements that need to be picked apart like entrails by the haruspices of the popular press.

My advice to them, not that I flatter myself they will take the slightest interest in it, is to stop sending Christmas cards altogether. Getting Christmas cards only encourages people. It takes five or ten years for your friends to get the message, become former friends and stop bothering to send you cards at all. Plus, if you’re the Prince of Wales, you will be spared opening your morning paper to discover that you’ve apparently been sending coded messages through your family snap like someone blinking in a hostage video. Time, money and face saved, you can concentrate on the important things in life: eating mince pies and snoozing in front of a Bond movie like everyone else.