Greeting a day not yours

Both Easters land today. The Western one and the Coptic one fall on the same Sunday this year, which they do not often do, so a company writing to Egypt has one greeting to send instead of two.

Most of the people writing it do not keep the day.

That position is more common in this region than the brief admits. A team in Cairo or Dubai writes to a customer whose holiday it is, from inside a company where this is an ordinary working Sunday, about a morning nobody in the room has had.

Two things go wrong from there, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is decoration. The team goes looking for symbols, finds a rabbit and a basket in a stock library, and produces something that reads as costume. A reader can tell in a second whether the sender has ever been to the lunch.

The second is the attachment. Somebody senior asks what the message is for, nobody can answer, so an offer gets bolted on. Fifteen per cent, today only, with the greeting above it. That is not a greeting any more. It is a promotion with a holiday in the subject line, arriving at a table with the family around it.

Refuse both and what is left is very small. The day named plainly, in the words the family uses for it. One true line about the morning, which is slow, and long, and full of relatives. Nothing to click. A person's name at the bottom, because a person chose to send it.

Two lines is enough. Two lines is usually better than four.

A greeting borrows a minute from a day that was never yours to spend. It gets handed back with nothing attached, or it does not get sent.