The unstoppable rise of the rude Christmas card

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.

In 2017, the BBC reported that card shop Scribbler had started placing “parental guidance” cautionary signs in the window of each branch, warning customers to “please be aware that some of our cards and gifts are of an adult nature”. The same year, Paperchase (RIP) recalled a line of sexually explicit Valentine’s Day cards after shoppers complained.

It seems like those outraged customers were a minority, though, because the crude card has only got more popular since then. A spokesperson for Moonpig, the customisable card company, tells me that they’ve “noticed an increased demand in the humour category as a whole”, which they reckon can be put down to “people wanting to see a more authentic tone of voice and realism”. Pip Heywood, the managing director at online card marketplace thortful, says that their “rude/funny” category has seen sales increase by 10 per cent year on year from 2023 to 2024. “It’s what the people want,” Heywood says, suggesting that the British public tends to have a “cultural love of dark or dry humour”.

For a while, Christmas was marked safe from the onslaught of banter, because, well, it’s a religious holiday and one that’s heavily geared towards kids. But as year-round offerings have become more risqué, this mood has naturally crept into the festive season, perhaps helped along by the fact that Christmas is becoming more and more secular (a 2020 survey from YouGov found that 82 per cent of Brits believe the religious aspects of Christmas are on the decline). It’s no longer enough to present the family with a nice watercolour rendering of a robin in a snowy garden and consider the job done. You need to run the risk of mortally offending them, or needle their biggest insecurity.

The loosening up of our social norms over the past few decades might have had an impact, too. Swearing is no longer a total taboo: a 2021 study from the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) found that six out of 10 respondents swore daily. “Contexts that used to be more formal are now much more informal,” says Dr Rebecca Roache, author of For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude and Fun. “A lot of workplaces are more casual and there’s a flat hierarchy, with people calling their managers by their first name. Swearing tends to be inappropriate in polite contexts, but often in friendlier, more casual contexts, we can get away with it without causing anyone offence.” So, our baseline for what is truly unacceptable has shifted – and it’s now much higher than it would have been, say, half a century ago. Roache also wonders whether our digital lives might be sneaking into the offline world, too. “We’re so used to seeing sweary jokes, maybe more than we would have before social media,” she adds.

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Neil Taylor is the founder of Deadpan, a brand whose niche is “cards that are a bit rude, but not in a sweary way” (sample slogan: “You are a frequent topic in my therapy”). He points to a linguistic phenomenon known as “semantic bleaching”, whereby a word’s meaning might gradually become diluted over time. “Take swear words: we use them to get a reaction, but the more you use them, the less impact they have – that’s the ‘bleaching’,” he says. “So to get the reaction, you need to use new or more offensive words. I think that’s why cards that used to say ‘I love you, you wally’ are now full of four-letter words.”

He also agrees that social media plays a part. “These days, everyone wants content,” he says. “You can post a picture of a funny or shocking card on Instagram, either as the giver or the receiver. No one’s going to post a card with a picture of a cute sparrow.”

Surprisingly, though, rude greeting cards pre-date social media by centuries. Even the seemingly prudish Victorians loved them. “Sending greeting cards became hugely popular in the late 19th century because colour printing was cheap and accessible, and postage was really cheap after the Penny Post came in,” says curator Stephanie Boydell. She works at the Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections Museum, home to the Laura Seddon Collection of 19th- and 20th-century cards. The archive includes various “vinegar Valentines”, postcards featuring insulting caricatures and mocking messages designed to offend the receiver.

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“They’d say things like ‘you think you’re really pretty, but in fact you’re quite ugly,’” Boydell explains. “Or, ‘you think you’ve got the voice of an angel, when in fact you sound like a strangled cat.” One of the more devastating cards in the collection reads: “You are not the belle of the ball, dear girl.” Many were sent anonymously, she adds, and while some might have been sent as a joke, “they weren’t necessarily received like that”. Who knew the Victorians were so dedicated to trolling?

In this century, trading insults is more likely to be a topsy-turvy way of showing our love, so sending a card with a coarse or four-letter word-laden message isn’t necessarily some sort of targeted attack on the recipient. “Swearing can be this intimate form of interaction,” Roache explains. It can show that you consider them “part of the inner circle, who you can swear with without [them] taking offence”.

Buying a card, she notes, is “an affectionate act in itself” – especially when we’re so used to digital communication – so “the fact that you’re doing something nice for them is a sort of insurance against them being offended”. The niceness of the gesture should mean that the message is taken in good humour. Conversely, those wary of pouring their hearts out can couch that sentiment in a layer of silliness. “Sending cards these days feels a bit sappy and earnest,” Taylor says. “People still quite like making the gesture, but want to subvert it at the same time. This is like men showing their closeness by taking the mick out of each other in the pub.”

Of course, humour is subjective, and the same card might delight one potential recipient and disgust another. It also depends on the bond you share. “If somebody buys their dad a card saying ‘you old git’, it [can be] a way of saying: ‘I love you and I’m happy we have this closeness,’” Roache says. “Whereas if you don’t have that relationship with your dad, that’s potentially awkward.”

This particular genre of card is going nowhere, so it’s up to us to use our common sense (and caution) when browsing. Got an auntie or uncle who complains to Ofcom every time there’s an expletive on TV before the watershed? Steer clear of that “Merry f***ing Christmas” slogan, complete with “cheeky” illustrations, lest you usher in an excruciating conversation over the mince pies.