‘Dearly beloved friends and family, well, what a year it’s been! Where to start?! The big event for us – aside from nurturing our preternaturally gifted children and enjoying multiple holidays in exotic locations – was the “K” for Rupert in the King’s Birthday Honours list. Mingling with the Beckhams at Buck House after the investiture was an experience we won’t forget in a hurry!!! Meanwhile, Sarah’s novel about Thucydides is doing rather well in the Kindle charts and Agatha, Mungo and Antigone continue to impress…’

A few years ago, by this point in Advent, many Spectator readers would have received a pile of similar missives tucked into Christmas cards. Usually destined to stoke the fire or swell the recycling, the ‘round robin’ or annual Christmas family newsletter and the curious combo of rage and hilarity they elicited in the recipient was once such a seasonal staple that the late Simon Hoggart compiled a whole volume of the most eye-rolling, contributed by readers of his Guardian column. Each December I dip into The Christmas Letters (2007) when I need perking up in the face of festive admin, then put my copy in the spare room for visitors to savour.

The format rarely varied and ran thus: brief handwringing over current geopolitical situation, prompting profound insights in the sender as to their own blessings.

Next: a tone-deaf non sequitur into a smug rundown of their children’s achievements. Extra props here to the sender if Agatha has passed Grade VIII (‘with distinction, to no one’s surprise!’) on an instrument played by only six other people in the country (euphonium/cor anglais/contrabassoon).

Social media – for which the hashtag humblebrag was invented – enables the drip-feeding of this nonsense

Then the holidays (more than you or I have managed in the past decade), ‘sampling fish stew from Cape Cod to Costa Rica!’.

There was often space for a Pooterish list of banalities, viz the hip replacement endured by one sender’s mother’s second cousin and/or an extensive list of the various ailments and catastrophes suffered.

‘We used to receive one from a Yorkshire friend who used the word “unfortunately” a lot,’ recalls Ysenda Maxtone Graham. ‘As in, “We went on holiday, then unfortunately mother went down with a bad case of diverticulitis…”.’

Sometimes, presumably on the grounds that it’s a good place to bury bad news, a marmalade-dropper will be hidden among the platitudes: ‘At the end of June Richard left me and the divorce will be finalised in the New Year.’ Then it’s a seamless segue into plans for the new extension and Araminta playing the triangle in the Royal Albert Hall!!! Exclamation marks are the hallmark of the round-robiner. Known as ‘screamers’ in our trade, Hoggart observes that the average newsletter contains so many, it’s virtually the shower scene in Psycho.

When I was a teenager in the 1990s, my parents used to receive dozens of Christmas round robins. (On one particularly irksome dispatch my sister scrawled the words ‘You’re mistaking me for someone who gives a shit’, then posted it back unsigned.)

Today, however, the round robin is an endangered species. We only get one – and that’s addressed to the people we bought our house from four years ago. (Barely knowing the recipient or, indeed, never receiving acknowledgement, is no deterrent to the round-robiner.) Highlights from last year’s included their cellar flooding, a holiday in Zermatt (‘The omnipresent Matterhorn was a wow!’) and a disappointing trip to Norfolk to see the Antony Gormley sculptures at Houghton Hall. ‘It turned out to be 100 identical casts… when you’d seen one, you’d seen them all really!’ I’m no expert, but I kind of thought that was the point.

Ysenda also receives an annual corker and we now ring each other up at the start of Christmas week to shriek delicious extracts down the phone at each other. Her sender is cock-a-hoop that her new daughter-in-law is now a son-in-law and will henceforth be known as ‘Hector’. Even a bout of Covid is no deterrent to achievement as it enabled her to ‘finally get round to rereading Ulysses’. A round robin even features in Ysenda’s new novella, Love Divine, in which the annoying character Debs reuses all the hackneyed phrases from last year’s newsletter.

So when did it all start and why the decline? Round robins were certainly around in the 1970s. In Class (1979), Jilly Cooper wrote that: ‘It is extremely vulgar to send your friends a Roneo-ed letter bringing them boastfully up to date with all the doings of your family.’ Hoggart observed that it is very much a middle-class foible and in all his years of collecting letters, he never received one from a working-class family.

As home computer ownership increased, round robins did so exponentially. Now pictures of ‘Maureen’s big five-0!’ could be reproduced and decorations added to the margin, so the list of NHS failures that contributed to John’s father’s death might be accompanied by sprigs of holly.

Technology did for the round robin in the end. Social media – for which the hashtag humblebrag was invented – enables the drip-feeding of this nonsense throughout the year. Now the most assiduous correspondents can leave lengthy ‘comments’ beneath news stories and holiday reviews running to several thousand words on Trip Advisor (‘the kimchi certainly did not disappoint!’).

It’s a shame, as one longs to know how the round-robiners are coping with the vicissitudes of our time – whose gifted child hasn’t been diagnosed with ADHD, generational disagreement on Gaza, VAT on school fees (‘Tiggy is thriving at a marvellous local [for which, read “state”] school’). We’re also denied the schadenfreude of when early promise wasn’t fulfilled. ‘Mungo is reading history of art at the University of the Home Counties (formerly Clacket Lane Services) but quite honestly, it’s a RELIEF that he didn’t get into Balliol as it just wouldn’t have been right for him!!!’

Sadly, as round-robiners might say, all good things have to come to an end (!) and so (I quote from one newsletter):‘All that remains is for me to wish you and yours bon courage in your travails, much joy in your pleasures and a blessed and peaceful Christmas and New Year!!’