It’s that time of year: Lots of Christmas greetings messages from PR folk. I don’t want to sound like Scrooge, but I’m never quite clear why they bother with these things.

Nokia sent me a link to a flash message with lots of phones doing stuff and thanks for “my continued support for Nokia”. A nice sentiment, though I’ve never thought of what I do in those terms, and I suppose I’d much rather have an answer to my now six-week old request for Nokia to do something about the piles of angry comments left on my blog from customers in India. Some of them are poignant, like messages from the afterlife or some terribly tragedy being played out online.

Yesterday I got one from Veena Meksol, who from her IP address is writing from Bangalore, and writes “sir, pl give me nokia service centre in bangalore, my hand set is just 5 months old but from 2 days i am not able here,” and then the message ceases. Heaven knows what happened to Veena, but I’d happily sacrifice a Flash-based Christmas card or six if Nokia could track her down end her agony.

 My problem is that I can’t really distinguish between a PR greetings card and spam, especially when spammers’ subject fields look remarkably similar . Is there any difference? And what is the correct protocol when you receive one? PR turnover is so high, most of the names mean nothing to me, which is presumably why some of them attach photos to them. They’re all extraordinarily good-looking, I have to say:

 I’m just not sure I’ve actually met any of them, or even communicated with them. The problem then is that I feel guilty. I don’t want to be one of those hacks that treats flacks like, well, flacks. On the other hand, who sends Christmas cards with pictures of themselves looking, well, great, if not to lure the recipient into some sort of trap?

Anyway, I knew the season had hit a fresh low when I got a box from the PR of a certain company which contained a card (thanks, guys!) and, buried amid the packaging, a small box of chocolates from Norman Love. The mouthwatering blurb that accompanied the chocs was impressive — “Norman Love Confections welcomes you to your first step in a delectable journey into the world of fine, handsome chocolates,” it began. All this may well have been true — including the assertion that each of the six chocolates was “an edible work of art” — but the effect was somewhat spoiled by the fact that the chocolates had not weathered the 10,000 km trip from Silicon Valley to Indonesia that well.

Frankly, they looked as if someone had sat on them, half eaten each of them, spat them out, sat on them again and then sprinkled the contents of their computer keyboard over them before putting them carefully back in the box and retying the ribbon. Maybe that’s the message the PR company intended to convey? If so, I’m surprisingly cool with that.