I would love for my next sentence to be an innocent one, but it is completely factual: I have received more than fifty Christmas greetings by email. Not written to me specifically, but automated by companies that thought it was an excellent idea.
They all say the same thing with different words, They all pretend a closeness that does not exist. And the most striking thing is not that they do it, but that the person who sends them knows that the recipients know that it is a lie, and they still send them. Welcome to the theater of obligatory cordiality, where we are all actors conscious of acting.
These christmas They usually come signed by the communication department, but it is not ‘communication’, it is maintenance of social infrastructure. Like watering a plastic plant: the gesture doesn’t make any sense, but doing it makes you feel better. The company that congratulates you has no feelings for you. The LinkedIn contact who hasn’t written to you in 364 days, either. But both have calculated that the cost of sending you that message (zero) is lower than the risk of you forgetting about them. It is calculation disguised as warmth.
It works because we have accepted a tacit agreement: We’re going to pretend these messages mean something if you pretend you appreciate them. Nobody believes anything. But we all participate. The real message is not “I wish you a brutal Christmas” but “I still exist on your radar.” They don’t wish you anything, they only mark territory in your attention.
And this contaminates even royal congratulations. We have turned a gesture of affection into a signal so degraded that it no longer communicates anything. Like when you repeat a word many times until it loses meaning:
Merry christmas.
Merry christmas.
Merry christmas.
Merry christmas.
It doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s just noise.
The bad thing about the system is that it generates its own incentives to perpetuate itself. If you don’t send your massive congratulations, someone will interpret your silence as disdain. So you do it. And in doing so, you contribute to the noise that you yourself hate. Each individual message seems innocuous, but the aggregate effect is the destruction of the meaning of the words.
And then there’s the absurd escalation. Because as everyone knows it is a lie, some try to differentiate themselves by adding layers of production. Videos with smiling employees, animated GIFs, Canva designs. As if the problem were packaging.
Christmas spam is not a volume problem. The thing is we have forgotten that silence is also valid. That saying nothing is better than saying something empty. But we live terrified of silence, we prefer constant noise. And if you refuse to participate, you will be the odd one out.
This is the sad thing: we know that it is a lie, that it contaminates real communication. But we keep doing it. Merry christmas.
In Xataka | Calling without warning has gone from being normal to being rude. And in that change we have lost something
Featured image | Xataka
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