The Kardashian Khristmas Kard is better than anything you'll send this festive season

Better this honest trash than 100 faux-modest round robins

(David LaChappelle)

Have you sent your Christmas cards yet? Don’t bother. One family has raised the bar so high as to make all of your neatly written Oxfam efforts look like scribbly Post-It notes. The Kardashian Khristmas Kard is already something of a phenomenon, a festive missive featuring America’s most egregiously famous family in matching couture and pouts. This year’s has been shot by David LaChappelle and cost $250,000, paid for, naturally, by the TV company behind their reality show.

The theme for 2013 is, I think, Shopping Mall Apocalypse or possibly The Illuminati Do Vegas. There are neon lights, celebrity magazines, babies. There are spooky, unnatural mannequins littered about, and shop dummies, too. No but seriously; the Kardashians look unreal even by their own airbrushed standards. Kim is leaning on a giant dollar sign, her mother posing beneath graffiti tags saying ‘Fame’ and ‘Money’ while her husband, Bruce looks on from inside a Perspex tube headed ‘Cashier’. It is vulgar, tasteless, the very last word in ostentation. But then aren’t all family Christmas cards a little bit? Better this honest trash than 100 faux-modest round robins about that hilarious thing that happened in Val d’Isere and Emily’s first gymkhana on her brand new pony.