The Christmas Letter - 12/10/08

Each day I wait for that dreaded holiday staple to arrive at my door. No, it’s not fruitcake, but it’s as sickeningly sweet and just as hard to swallow: The Christmas Letter.

Before you flood me with e-mails and phone calls, I will concede that not all Christmas letters are terrible. We are a generation of busy people, and though we have the best intentions of keeping each other up to date in our lives, we don’t always follow through. The Christmas letter allows people to share the highs (and sometimes lows) of the past 12 months with family and friends.

However, when I receive a Christmas letter, I can’t help but feel that it contains two underlying messages:

#1: You’re not important enough in my life to warrant a phone call or even e-mail when something great happens to me, so here’s my year in one generic page.

#2: My life is better than yours.

Most of the Christmas letters I receive seem to be a laundry list of perfect lives, complete with acne-free, even-tempered, overachieving children (“…Sally was valedictorian of her pre-school class, and enjoys throwing pottery and reading Russian literature in her spare time…”), envious vacations (“…Aspen was just getting too routine, so this year’s we’re giving Gstaad a try!”), and exhausting activities (“Bobby’s decided to scale back on his sports this year, focusing only on football, lacrosse, hockey, karate and soccer. He sure misses the swim team.”). It’s just not possible to be that smug and happy outside of a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie. Is it?

Then there’s the annual letter from my husband’s friend Charlie. Charlie is a 60-something free spirit who spends his year leading cross-country ski tours along the edge of The Grand Canyon, taking groups of kayakers to Belize and acting as a white-water raft guide in the Grand Teton Mountain Range. My husband’s shoulders droop a little after reading Charlie’s letter, so he hugs his children tight and tells himself that yes; he did make the right choices in life.

Each year I threaten to write the Anti-Christmas Letter. It would probably go something like this: “Happy Holidays everyone! Wondering what we’ve been up to this year? Mike continues to spend 3-4 hours in the car commuting to Providence each day, we’re so thankful that gas has gone down to $1.75 a gallon. Xander’s asthma is finally under control but now there are braces in his future. Cooper’s doing much better in school; only one trip to the principal’s office so far. Thankfully, our CPA friend was able to intervene with the IRS on that 2005 tax mix-up…”

Actually, I don’t need to write a letter like this because my husband’s cousins send it to us each year. Connie and Ted are decent, salt-of-the-earth, mid-western folk. Each year their letter contains horrific tales of illness, industrial accidents, death and loss of limbs (really.) It’s like a Christmas letter straight from the book of Job. And yet, invariably they end each letter with, “We are so thankful for all of God’s blessings.” It’s the one letter we get that actually makes us feel better about our lives.

So by all means, send me your cards, your photos, and if you must, your Christmas letters. But I warn you, the latter will just end up underneath my holiday paperweight: the fruitcake.