Julia of all Trades Master of None: Christmas Cards

Since last year I have not become any more fond of Christmas Cards. I still don't know what to do with the ones I get. People make washing lines of them and even buy special pegs to hang them up with. When I was a child we had a Christmas card tree, which was a pop up cardboard contraption that you had to slot the cards into. I remember it as something which the cards fell out of that gathered dust and just looked a bit stupid. But rather than ranting on like a grumpy old woman this blog is devoted to what I'm doing instead and other people's Christmas Cards.

This year I have donated what I would have spent on cards to Breast Reconstruction Awareness. This is a small group based at Broomfield Hospital. They organise meetings for women due to have breast reconstruction and were fantastic support to a good friend when she was having treatment for breast cancer. Most of us can't begin to imagine or would want to imagine what goes through your mind when you are told that you have breast cancer. Once you get over the, "Am I going to die?" question there are so many other things to worry about; drugs, operations, side-effects, how everyone else will cope. If you have a good medical team then most of those questions can be answered but there will be one major question that you will need an answer to that they may not be able to help with, even if you have the courage to ask. "How will I look afterwards?" It might seem a shallow question but really who wants to look odd? How wonderful would it be to be able to have a cup of tea and a biscuit with people who'd been there and were happy to show and tell?

Although, I hate giving and receiving cards I am always fascinated with the personalised cards given by the rich and famous, particularly politicians. This year David Cameron gave a Christmas Card that should have had sent his PR people's head's spinning like something out of the exorcist.

It looks fairly wonderful, doesn't it? A celebration of everything that was good in 2012. The jubilee, the olympics and Sing Up (see the boy in the green cap). Of course the current conservative government are responsible for all of that, aren't they? They believe in the Queen and like her so much they invited her to a cabinet meeting today and gave her a set of coasters. They made sure the Olympics went ahead and had their photographs taken with every winning athelete. And they understand how important singing is in schools - don't they? You may not have heard of Sing Up. It was the most brilliant, fantastic, amazing FREE resource available to all schools funded by the government. It was started in 2007 with an investment of £10 million, to introduce a national singing programme and the project was such a success that they guaranteed a further £10 million for each of the next 4 years until March 2011. This scheme had managed to help and encourage 98% of primary schools to use singing on a daily basis. Then in 2011, the new government had to decide whether they thought this was important. Everyone was worried that funding would just stop but they agreed to fund Sing Up for another year. £4 milliion is enough to run a project that was costing £10, surely? I know times are supposed to be tough but when a project is so successful it does seem a little less than supportive to slash it's budget by 60%. Sing Up is still going, it still tries to be brilliant but now you have to pay membership it has become a bit complicated and confusing. Everyone is just a little worried that £4 million may be considered too much to spend next year on a music project when it's not even part of the new E-Bacc. That would be such a shame. Mr Cameron should take a long hard look at how proud that little boy is to be wearing his Sing Up cap before he makes any funding decisions.

Oh dear, that's a bit political and ranty. The other politician's Christmas cards hopefully won't inspire such rage.