Stasis makes me antsy. As a consequence, I’ve cycled through a lot of different houses over the past few years. Rather strange houses. I’ve lived in everything from a tacky condominium in Boca Raton, a renovated bowling alley apartment in Fayetteville, a secluded log cabin in the middle of the Ozark Forest, an old terraced flat overlooking the Atlantic, to my present house, a somewhat bland townhouse with a view to the cemetery across the road, where the tombstones are so close I can tell you from my living room window the date Edward Sullivan died (Feb 18, 1932). I haven’t lost any money with all this moving; I haven’t gained much either, just sort of broke even. It terms of resale strategy, my only buying philosophy is to purchase in the niche market, which means that while most people are going to be put-off on your house because of some odd feature or other, there’s always a strong contingency who fall in love with it just because of it. (At least that’s what I thought prior to this last graveyard house, which I can’t unload now. But I blame the credit crunch, not the corpses.) Each house was great while it lasted. The flat overlooking the ocean was lovely, until I left the window upstairs open one day and a giant seagull flew in while I was away. I had two cats at the time. Let’s just say it looked like I came home to a crime scene.
Anyway, with all this moving around, I’ve also had my share of neighbours. And since I’ve lived in each house at least a year, I’ve run into the same awkward conundrum every December. Should I send Christmas cards to these people, or not? I’m not exactly unfriendly, but neither am I the most sociable person in the world. I bought the log cabin in the woods during a particularly reclusive phase. I think it had something to do with being gay and living in Arkansas at the time. I wasn’t so much in the closet as I was a panic room. But even then, I felt this pressure to be neighbourly with my only two neighbours in a 5-mile radius. And so I looked up their names and stuck generic Christmas cards in each of their mailboxes. Boy was that a mistake. When you live in the middle of nowhere, you tend not to expect a lot of company. So when I was eating scrambled eggs in my underwear around noon the next day and an old woman with her middle-aged daughter came by to personally thank me for the card, the exchange was a little weird. And the other neighbour, who I thought was “just” a schizophrenic with PTSD from serving in the Vietnam war, turned out actually to be a fugitive from Illinois suspected in the disappearance of his ex-wife and living under an alias while trading in semi-automatic weapons and pitbulls. Nice enough guy, though. He, too, stopped by to thank me for the card and held my ear for a good two hours about government conspiracies and spying satellites camouflaged as stars.
I guess I always viewed non-familial Christmas cards as an arms-length way of saying to the other person, “Look, in case I ever, God forbid, need help in an emergency, could you lend me a hand? Remember that Christmas card I sent you? Until then, let’s just give the peremptory smile and wave as the situation demands, shall we.” Don’t get me wrong, I like getting them. But I know some people take this Christmas card thing really seriously.
There have been two notable psychological studies involving Christmas card behaviour. One is a 2000 article published by sociologist Jenifer Kunz from West Texas A&M University in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills. The author randomly selected almost 600 names from a directory listing in her area that included names, addresses and occupations of residents within the city limits. She sent Christmas cards to these people, either fancy commercial cards or cheap, hand-written “Merry Christmas” cards on a square of red or green. Half of the receivers were “high status” people (lawyers, doctors, CEOs, CPAs, etc.) and the rest “low status” individuals (“those with obvious blue collar occupations”). Kunz also manipulated the social status of the alleged sender. Half of the recipients received a card from a “Dr.” So-and-So and the remaining half just the first name of the sender. The researcher then sat back and counted up the responses that came in. Only 20% of those who received the stranger’s cards responded by returning a Christmas card, letter, or telephone call to the unknown sender. But people were significantly more likely (78% vs. 22%) to respond to the high status (i.e., “Dr.”) sender. There was also a slight trend for low status receivers to respond more frequently to high status senders than those in their own social class. These general findings support Kunz’s basic “upward mobility” hypothesis that Christmas card behaviour reflects the standard dynamics of social competition. I guess it also explains why these blue-collar neighbours of mine showed up on my doorstep in the woods back in Arkansas.
Another influential Christmas card study, this one rather well-known, was done by anthropologists Russell Hill from Durham University and Robin Dunbar, now at Oxford. The Human Nature study was meant to provide an empirical test of the latter’s hypothesis that among species that live in intense social groups, such as humans and other primates, there are real constraints on the size of social networks due to basic information processing demands. Dunbar essentially developed a formula whereby the size of the neocortex in any given species can be used to predict the default size of the social group for an individual member of that species. Based on this formula, Dunbar reasoned that humans should live in social groups of about 130-150 individuals (which includes people we value and consider important), since beyond this the brain cannot keep accurate track of relational vicissitudes and the cognitive system is taxed. And here’s where the Christmas card bit comes in. The authors sent out questionnaires to potential participants during the holiday season. The respondents were asked to think about the people they were sending Christmas cards to, and for each of these receivers, to note down the distance of that person, the nature of the relationship (family, work colleague, friend, neighbour), social status (single individual vs. couple vs. family), the last contact they’d had, and their emotional closeness to the receiver on a scale of 0 (not close at all) to 10 (extremely close).
Here’s what Hill and Dunbar found. Forty-three participants actually completed the questionnaires and returned them to the investigators. The total number of Christmas cards sent out among this group was 2,984 cards, with a mean number of 68 cards. Keeping in mind that many cards were sent to couples and families, the average network size worked out to 154 people. But since sometimes the senders actively contacted only a targeted member of the family rather than the entire household, the corrected mean was actually 125 people. This was almost bulls-eye specific for Dunbar’s estimate. Other significant findings to emerge from this study were that from about the age of 30 or so, couples and families make up a higher proportion of the social network. But the network size remains constant throughout the life course (presumably, one just has fewer single friends). Hill and Dunbar also looked at the size of “sympathy groups” (particular people in the social network from whom one would seek advice, support, or help in times of severe emotional or financial distress) and found some tangential support in their study that this number hovers between about 12-15 people.
It’s a pain in the ass, really, but I guess I’ll send a few cards out this year. If only I remember my neighbour’s wife’s name.
