Feel compelled to remind your in-laws that Christmas might be the perfect time to “drink Baileys until you s*** yourself?” There’s a card for that. Want some double entendres based around (delete as inappropriate) sacks, packages, nuts or the phrase “ho, ho, ho”? You’re in luck. And if you prefer your profanities to gesture in symbolic reverie, perhaps you’d be interested in an illustration of a raised middle finger, wrapped in Christmas lights? Christmas cards, it seems, have gotten rude.
The pervading bawdiness that underlies many of this year’s options didn’t materialise out of nowhere, Angel Gabriel-style. Instead, it’s the inevitable culmination of a shift towards quote-unquote “cheekiness” in our greetings cards that seemed to take hold of the industry in the mid-2010s, when you’d see novelty versions featuring edgy, pop culture-adjacent jokes in millennial-favoured stores like Urban Outfitters. Endless variations on “Happy Birthday, you t**t” soon jostled for space on shop shelves. Cards bearing vintage-style images overlaid with not-safe-for-work captions proliferated, and it became hard to hunt down a Father’s Day card that didn’t colour the recipient as some sort of heavy-drinker or flatulent bore who rarely ventures outside of the garden shed.
