This month, I received an emailed Christmas letter from a relative for whom I have a great deal of affection. When I first went through it, I calculated it to be about 30 pages long. When I went back to review, I saw that it was 52. The text was essentially limited to picture captions, sparing recipients the kind of earnest reportorial tone typical to holiday letters exchanged within a certain caste on the East Coast. (“Luckily, Sally was back at Andover when our lab, Carlyle, succumbed to testicular cancer after 12 dutiful years.”)

The document was a visual record of trips taken since the previous December — to Dubai, Myanmar, Singapore, London, New York, the island of Petit St. Vincent, grandchildren in the Midwest and minor league baseball stadiums in the Southeast. Was this an extended-play “wealfie?” I considered the question after learning that the Manhattan advertising executive Richard Kirshenbaum had recently coined the term to refer to, as he put it in a column for The New York Observer last month, “selfies taken in a luxury context that confirm one has money, status and social currency.” I determined that although the letter recorded an enviable life, it was too warm, too quirky, too intimate, too full of scenes in what appeared to be Wisconsin amusement parks to really qualify.

And yet there can be little dispute that December is the season of the wealfie, in the broadest, most metaphoric terms. The paradigmatic wealfie is the image you take of yourself getting on or off a private jet, possibly on your way to New Year’s Eve in Morocco or Anguilla. (As a riff on his whole notion, Mr. Kirshenbaum appears in an ad for a membership jet service, called Wheels Up, disembarking from a small plane.) But to the extent that people so closely identify with the things that they buy and receive, the picture shot of the Hermès or Chanel or Prada gift “unboxed” and then posted on Instagram is another kind of wealfie. Of course, there are so many ways to broadcast status these days.

Image Richard Kirshenbaum, an advertising executive, author in New York City. Credit... Edon Gottlieb

A few weeks ago, on an exploratory mission, I called a Maserati dealership in Manhattan to see what, if any, holiday shopping had taken place there. The salesman who picked up the phone, had, in fact, just delivered a Maserati with a big red bow wrapped around it to a woman in New Jersey who was getting the car as an early Christmas present from her husband, a doctor. If this scene unfolded in an episode of “The Affair,” the wife would see the car and immediately go back inside and start rifling through her husband’s American Express bills to figure out what he was really doing when he said he was at an obstetrics conference in Pittsburgh in October.