Love at Christmas

Handwritten Cards, Invisible Threads and The Ritual Of Staying Connected

After our last blog, many of you wrote to say it felt like taking a long needed breath. Some of you said you finally felt permission to choose yourself without apology. Others shared that you were still somewhere in between, holding it all together while secretly wondering what a softer life might look like for you.

A few of you asked a simple but important question. Who is writing?

The honest answer is both of us. We live in this space together, but bring different colours to the pages.

Some would say I am a deep thinker who leans towards philosophy, humour and analogy. I compare your heart to a garden, your burnout to a phone on one per cent, and somehow land it in a way that makes you laugh and think at the same time. If you start to notice philosophers appearing more than seems strictly necessary, you can usually assume that is my fingerprint on the page. Nai is more psychoanalytic and poetic. She writes from lived, empirical experience, folding in the questions that come up in the therapy room and in everyday life. People often say, "that is exactly how I feel, I just could not find the words".

I am movement and play; Nai is the giver of language when feelings are crowding at the door. Some philosophers suggest that what we cannot name, we struggle to truly know. I am fairly sure they were not thinking about Christmas card lists at the time, but they would probably agree that once Nai starts naming things, even a half-formed thought suddenly turns into a whole essay.

My work, inside and outside the therapy room, is to stand in that liminal space between feeling and speech and gently translate the unsaid into words that let people recognise themselves. When you read a piece here, sometimes you are sitting more with Mon’s voice. Sometimes it is me holding the pen. Most often, it is both of us in conversation, passing the story back and forth until it feels like a shared truth. Whenever a piece has been written together, as this one has, it will always be signed, With love always, Mon and Nai. That is how you will know you are hearing our combined voice.

For this final blog of 2025, the thread remains the same. November invited us to come home to ourselves. December invites us to come home to each other. To the people who have held us in small, steady ways all year and to the traditions that pull us out of rush and back into intentional relationship building.

This is what Love at Christmas looks like here. Not grand gestures. Just slow, meaningful care driven by pure intention.

Christmas is Mon’s favourite time of the year. For us, it is often a period of reflection, re-evaluation, planning, and spending the last few weeks of the year with family and friends.

It is also special because Mon makes her mince pies; there is honestly nothing like them. Don't tell her that I've told you she stole Jamie Oliver's recipe🤫.

As a couple who enjoy spending time together, whether doing activities or simply sitting still, this season feels different.

Conversations stretch out. We find ourselves reminiscing about the last twelve months, our favourite moments, our hardest ones, and offering each other gratitude for how we showed up. At weekends, the ritual begins. Boxes of decorations come out, colour themes are debated, and there is the annual question of whether Mon is going to put a Christmas tree in every room, because one tree simply isn't enough to make it feel like Christmas. 

The memory of Mon throwing the biggest tantrum and crying her eyes out at a Christmas tree market in Finsbury Park still makes me laugh. I know some of our OG supporters will remember. The man selling the tree looked on, completely confused, while I stood there laughing until

I cried because it was the funniest thing to witness.

You had to be there to feel the full drama of Mon crying big girl tears because the tree was a bit muddy. The drama did not end at the market. Back at the flat, the tree turned out to be too big and too heavy to get inside.

In true Mon form, she stopped a stranger on the street and asked if he would help. Part of her still believes she is back on the islands, where if a neighbour is walking by, you stop them for a chat, or they offer to help before you even ask. Some days, it is as if she is still living in Anguilla, a time and place where she was most happy, content, and felt like she belonged. I secretly think those childhood memories are what keep her so beautifully grounded now.

To my surprise, the stranger helped without hesitation, and the whole thing was worth it.

The tree was stunning. Mon was happy as ever. She sat by it every morning, just taking it in.  For about a month, I heard the same sentence, Is the tree not beautiful, Nai, and each time I agreed while she smiled and stared at it over her morning coffee.

Once Christmas had passed and the new year arrived, Mon packed all the decorations away and meticulously chopped the tree down into small pieces, bagged them, and stored them to dry for the next eleven months. That is how her mind works. Nothing is ever just an object. Everything has a second life, a story, a future moment already being curated in her head.

By the time the next November rolled around, the tree had one more role to play.

On Bonfire Night the following year, those branches were burned on the fire pit. The smell of pine in the cold air, the sparks against the dark sky, made it feel as though the joy of that Christmas was being relit all over again. One tree had become two memories, two seasons, one long moment of home carried from December into November, the kind of loop Mon lives for. A truly Love at Christmas moment.

Another activity we enjoy, perhaps my favourite, and one that has become a couple's ritual turned annual tradition, is handwriting and sending our loved people Christmas cards.

We could send a text, sure. We often do during the year. If you know my Mon, she loves a voice note, and do not bother calling her voice call. She is a video call kinda girl. She wants to see your face.

But at Christmas, we choose the slower way. Selecting the card. Sitting at the table. Sealing the envelope. Sticking the stamp. Walking it to the post box. It is slow, with love and care on purpose.

Across traditions, people have regarded handwriting as a practice of attention and devotion, from Buddhist sutra copying to thank offerings and petitions left at holy sites.

Before screens and notifications, there was simply a hand, a thought, and something to write with. On clay, on stone, on bark or on paper. Love letters folded into pockets and left in secret locations, prayers pressed into walls, names traced carefully on the inside cover of a book. The tools change, but the gesture is the same.

I often picture our cards, symbolically like a string. One that keeps us connected to those we love. Most of the time, it is invisible, living in memory and in the body, in the way your nervous system settles when a certain name appears on your phone.

Not getting overly psychoanalytical, but in the therapy room, we might call it an internal picture of the people we are bonded to.

The card is the tiny external version of that picture. It is the moment the invisible string becomes something you can actually hold.

Our Christmas card is a promise, even if we never say it out loud. A promise to keep a thread between us intact for one more year. A promise to say, in ink if not in person, we love you.

There is also a particular tenderness in sending a card through the post. Part of it is knowing that, at some point in the next few days, their letterbox will open and our handwriting will fall into their world.

Over the years, our cards have become a favourite among friends and family, partly because of the wax seal on the envelope. Sometimes it is an image, sometimes a few loving words. This year, it is our initials. If you know us, you know we try to create elegance and a sense of luxury in everything we do, so of course, there is a wax seal with our names on it for our most loved ones. Often, there is a call or a message soon after. "The card has arrived", "Thank you", - Or a string of heart eyes emojis, little notes about how beautiful or fancy it felt to open, or a hand written letter in return. With each exchange leaving us feeling more loved than the year before with joy travelling both ways.

This piece is really about that thread. Christmas cards as objects that live in the home, as archives of family life, and as a way of making meaning out of our emotional lives. It is also about the way words shape reality. The sentence written in a card does not only describe a relationship. It nudges that relationship in a particular direction.

This idea of how we can take better care of relationships is not a new phenomenon.

Anthropologists have shown that letters do social work. They sustain kinship and chosen family ties by making presence tangible when people are apart.

A letter says, I was thinking of you at a particular time, in a particular place, and I turned that thought into something you can hold. We choose cards, write names, and copy out familiar phrases. Often, the content is entirely predictable. Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Yet the message is not in the wording. The message is in the act.

Our love at Christmas returns to this act through intention and the continued cultivation of the relationships we value.

The connection still matters, even if we have not spoken in a while. A healthy connection makes room for space, remembering that life can be distracting at times because we are all navigating unique situations that will require space, from time to time. And if someone has fallen off our list, because the relationship has changed, that absence carries its own meaning holding onto the moments that were kind.

In that sense, the cards become a kind of archive.  Years from now, I can imagine opening a box and seeing the story of our people written out in small December instalments. Handwriting that thickens and then shakes. New names added. Others disappearing.  Addresses crossed out and written again as lives move and reshuffle.

Thinking out loud, in this moment, perhaps this is also why card writing has such a particular place in my heart. As an adolescent, I migrated from the Caribbean, leaving Trinidad, where I was raised by my grandmother from six weeks old, and moved to England to be reunited with my mother, younger sister and the rest of my family.

The distance was brutal. I missed home. I missed her. Our way of staying connected was letters. I remember the excitement of seeing one arrive, the way my whole body would know before my mind caught up. I would open it and cry floods of tears as I read, so homesick it felt like my chest might split, but held for a moment by her words on the page.

Over time, I began to notice the tiniest changes in her handwriting. The way the letters softened, thinned, wobbledslightly. A sign of age and fragility showing up in the body, through her writing. The way writing starts to look again like it did when we were children, careful and a little unsure.  

When I talk about handwriting that thickens and then shakes, I am thinking of her hands as much as anything else.  Perhaps every card I write now is, in some quiet way, a continuation of those letters.  

A way of saying, I learnt this way of loving from you🤍

I think often about how ordinary all of this looks from the outside.

Just cards on a table. Just a walk to the post box. Just names on a list.

Yet inside, so much more is happening!

We are practising how to notice who has held us.

We are allowing our bodies to slow down long enough to feel something real.

We are stitching a handful of relaxed December evenings into a pattern that says, This is how we love. Slowly. On purpose. With our hands as well as our hearts.

Maybe that is what I love most about this ritual. It holds all of it at once. Gratitude and disappointment. Old histories and new beginnings. The ache of what has changed and the steadiness of what has stayed. All of it gets folded into paper, sealed with wax, and sent out into the world to land where it needs to land.

And for a brief moment, in the middle of an ordinary day, a small thread between two lives briefly comes alive.

I hope you enjoyed reading our final blog of the year and maybe even found inspiration in this practice of love between Nai and I, to create your own community held together by invisible thread.

With love always,

Mon and Nai  ♡