Did you miss my letter?
It’s that time of year again – time to buy presents, put up the
holiday lights, and of course, write the annual Christmas letter to
family and friends.
Only I am rather looking to get out of doing any of that.
I have already done the presents, since I went online yesterday
and bought just about everything I needed to get anyone. That’s off
the list.
Did you miss my letter?
It’s that time of year again – time to buy presents, put up the holiday lights, and of course, write the annual Christmas letter to family and friends.
Only I am rather looking to get out of doing any of that.
I have already done the presents, since I went online yesterday and bought just about everything I needed to get anyone. That’s off the list.
And I don’t put up holiday lights anymore, since we live way out in the country where no one sees them. (I used to, years ago when my sons were little, because they liked them so much. Now they’re teenagers and such picayune things no longer thrill them. Ah, the good old days.)
Plus there is the matter of the PG&E bill. But I digress.
At any rate, there is the Christmas letter (or holiday missive, if you prefer). I have written a Christmas letter every year for the past 23 years. Except for last year, when I didn’t get around to it.
I have to confess, I was feeling a trifle unappreciated in the Christmas letter department. There were a few years when I went to the trouble of making them clever and different. Did anyone notice? No.
Maybe people out there just expect cleverness from me in a letter, since I am a writer by trade. Maybe they don’t think I need any praise.
But there were a few years, as I said, when I went to some trouble.
Just to see if anyone would notice.
In particular, there was one letter that I was very fond of, all in humorous verse (which even rhymed!) But no one said a word about it.
So then I went in the opposite direction – making my letters as ordinary as possible. Informative, unobtrusive, and cheerful.
Nothing anyone would be pasting in their holiday scrapbooks.
Well, no one asked where the clever letters had gone. So I figured that it was OK to put in only a minimum amount of effort.
But then I didn’t get around to doing one last year, and people starting asking me, “What happened to your Christmas letter?”
So I guess someone out there was reading them after all.
Christmas letters are a strange bit of business. You want to tell people what you’ve been up to, but you don’t want to depress them with your brother’s stint in jail or your uncle’s hernia operation. Likewise, you don’t want to brag (too much) about your daughter getting into Harvard or your winning the lottery.
The letter writer must walk a fine line between the good, the bad, and the ugly in writing the holiday letter. It’s not easy, but it can be done.
So perhaps my letter will read something like this:
“Dear friends and relations: We’ve had a good year. How about you? We did some interesting things, spent time with loved ones, visited some nice places and observed our children succeeding at this or that. Oh, and by the way: the dog’s tumor was benign.
“In all, a lovely year. Hope it was good for you, too. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kickin’ Kwaanza and a Wondrous Winter Solstice!”
Now does that cover all the bases, or what?
