Once upon a not-so-distant Christmas, celebration demanded our bodies as much as our wallets. We walked into bakeries instead of scrolling through apps, lingered over greeting cards instead of forwarding templates, and waited—patiently—for letters to arrive with familiar handwriting. Christmas was not merely consumed; it was felt.
Today, in the age of emojis, instant deliveries, and algorithmic “customisation,” the festival arrives fully packaged at our doorstep—and often leaves without leaving a trace. This reflection asks a simple but unsettling question: in exchanging time, touch, and thought for speed and convenience, what have we quietly bartered away to belong to the digital economy of Christmas?
From Greeting Cards to Emojis: What Did We Trade Away to Belong to Digital Christmas? How did Christmas look in the analog world?
A time when the landline telephone was our primary technology of connection—a device meant for voices, not texts; for pauses, not emojis; for presence, not performance. Christmas then was undoubtedly a season of market activity—cakes, stars, festoons, greeting cards—but it was not yet a season fully owned by the market. There is a crucial difference between Christmas markets and marketing Christmas, between exchange and extraction, between participation and consumption.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Christmas was an embodied experience. The market existed, yes—but it had not yet colonised affect. One entered shops slowly, bodily, with time. The act of choosing a greeting card was almost ritualistic: flipping through glossy pages, pausing over colours and fonts, opening cards to see whether the printed words resonated with what one wanted to say. Touch mattered. Smell mattered—the faint fragrance of freshly printed cards, ink, paper. The market, then, allowed space for improvisation. It did not speak fully on our behalf.
Crucially, greeting cards were incomplete objects until we finished them. The scribbled lines inside—formal, awkward, poetic, intimate—were inscriptions of selfhood. With no digital templates to “lift” language from, our minds laboured lovingly over words. From a hesitant Hi to borrowed poetry, these were expressions shaped by time, care, and thought. The post(wo)man, too, was part of this affective circuit. The arrival of post was an event—anticipation, excitement, curiosity about whose handwriting waited inside the envelope. Time itself was stretched, not compressed.
Cakes, too, were not outsourced experiences. There was no Swiggy, no Zomato. One had to go to the bakery. To step into a space thick with the aroma of freshly baked cakes was itself festive. Gifting cakes meant visiting homes, exchanging smiles, staying awhile. Sometimes the visit ended with sharing the same cake—an act that transformed a commodity into communion. Bonds were strengthened not merely through exchange, but through shared consumption, through being together.
The market then still left room for what we might call sensorial authorship—the ability to personalise Christmas through touch, smell, taste, voice, and time. Consumption was slow, social, and affect-laden. The human was not yet reduced to a user.
Enter Christmas 2025.
We are told this is the age of customisation—a seductive term that carefully disguises how much experiential space the market has devoured. There are no greeting cards, only virtual messages sent with a single click to countless contacts. The market generously “saves” us time and thought by offering pre-packaged emotions, templates that circulate endlessly, emptied of specificity. Telephone wishes, the feel of paper, the taste of bakery air—these have quietly gone extinct.
Emojis now stand in for emotions, curated and standardised by platforms that profit from our affective minimalism. WhatsApp groups overflow with forwarded greetings that cost nothing but data—no time, no labour, no emotional risk. The word friend becomes strangely hollow when one no longer knows how many people received the same message. Decorations arrive at our doorstep through online platforms; choice is visual, instantaneous, frictionless. Individualisation reaches its peak precisely when experience becomes most uniform.
We are now participants in a largely visual economy, reduced to scrolling, selecting, clicking. The olfactory and tactile worlds are colonised by delivery apps. The warmth of human exchange is replaced by logistical efficiency. Christmas becomes spectacle—smooth, convenient, strangely affectless.
This is not a nostalgic rejection of technology. With full acknowledgment—and gratitude—for gig workers who make life easier, especially for working mothers like me, one question still lingers:
Is there really no difference between a gig worker delivering a cake and a friend standing at your door, smiling, holding it in their hands?
What, finally, have we bartered away to belong to the digital economy of Christmas?
Time. Thought. Sensation. Presence.
And perhaps, without quite noticing, a certain way of being human.
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