Holiday Letters

Be very kind to one another.

Blessed is the season
which engages the whole world
in a conspiracy of love.
—Hamilton Wright Mable

A lifetime ago, early in my years as a Minneapolitan, the Minnesota Twins won the World Series. It wasn’t as shocking an upset as the curse-breaking Cubs win in 2016, but still, it was a mighty big deal. It was the first time the team had won in Minnesota, and the first time they’d won, period, since 1924, when they won in D.C. under the banner of the Washington Senators.

Minnesota being Minnesota, the folks who got to attend the playoffs—that occasion such a shock that the city had already gone into a tizzy—weren’t only the rich and well connected. A raffle let in a sizeable number of plain old ordinary folks, too. I was one of them. I got to see the team win the AL championship, and I still have a Homer Hanky to prove it, faded but intact.

This was such a phenomenal event that I decided to do something I’d never done before. I used my ticket stubs to decorate my first-ever holiday letter. I didn’t talk much about what my family had done that year, or what achievements we’d accomplished. I mostly talked about what it had been like to watch a World-Series-winning team in my adopted hometown. I freely admitted I was a fair-weather baseball fan. I’d never paid any attention to the Twins. I didn’t even consistently follow baseball. But just as everybody is Irish on March 17, for those golden years in the late 1980s (the Twins won the following year, too), I was a Fan.

By the time I’d written all that, I was out of room. I’d filled the front and back sides, single spaced. Other than the amateurishly xeroxed ticket stubs, there were no graphics or images. I’d broken pretty much every rule about readability.

Quite a few people told me it was the best holiday letter they’d ever gotten. And they weren’t all my mother, either. My ego adequately stroked, I decided to make it an annual ritual. Rereading some of those missives, I’ve blushed at the purple prose and other self-indulgent mash I sent out some years. But for good or ill, that letter has been one dependable consistency in my life, at a time when dependability and consistency seem to have gone the way of the Dodo bird.

Holiday letters written not to impress but to share what’s in your heart serve another, crucial function, too: they solidify history. Not just yours, but the world as it was during your lifetime. Like me, you’ll rediscover moments you had long since forgotten, however much you might redden at how you described them. Your extended family and descendants will thank you for the insights into their family that you provided them through these missives.

And no matter how modestly you might have lived your life as an ordinary person, somewhere, some future Ken Burns could discover your trove and piece together a little fragment of history that nobody knew before. Something about the way you made cookies distinctively yours, the peculiar architecture of your add-on back porch, the amiability of your enormous Maine Coon cat—that is all grist for future anthropologists and historians to revere. And, more to our point here today, grist for your letter.

Don’t write about how great your kids are. Do tell us what they’re up to as miniature human beings—including the successes and disappointments. Don’t describe the weather “as I sit down to write this letter.” Do tell us about the year’s third school-closing blizzard that drove your family to make up new ways to build snow people. (Or how your kid built a gadget to make it easier to provide water for urban wildlife during the drought.)

Don’t describe painful stuff you don’t think is anybody’s business, or that isn’t your story to tell. But if there are vulnerabilities you are comfortable sharing, people will be moved by your trust, and that shared empathy will possibly warm up a collective space in the Universe that might make something somewhere a little better, if only for a few moments.

In her blog, Amy Castro gives advice diametrically opposed to what I’ve written above, and she’s not wrong:

A good holiday letter is short and to the point. Think about what you’d share if you had 10 minutes to talk with a friend you hadn’t seen in the past year. The letters I keep include major events and a quick update on each family member without going overboard into the minutia. They include funny or inspiring stories unique to that person or family.

Can we both be right? Sure we can: you are familiar with Schrodinger’s cat? I’m not here to unravel paradoxical puzzles. I think that as a grownup, you can decide who to believe.

Do you love words and language and prose? And you have no graphic or visual skills whatsoever? Maybe going a little deeper into your words will be fine, as it’s been fine for me.

Are you a visual person, or a poet, or busy? Lean into photos (Castro notes the pleasure photos provide in documenting your kid’s all-too-rapid growth from year to year), use bullets and large-print headings, and stick with highlights.

My favorite annual letter is from a former art director who is also good with words, so I get a fabulous serving of visual and word skills in a one-page publication with headlines, captions, photo credits—he even cites the fonts used in each issue. Highlights of his newsy periodical include his awards in the Minnesota State Fair Corn Art competition, his wife’s terrifyingly obsessive adventures in birdwatching, and multi-year bureaucratic hurdles he’s mounted. Most of us don’t have David’s meticulous and quietly ironic talents, but you can take his cue and create a missive that’s more a piece of art than a letter. Here are a few Pinterest examples. If you have a kid under 12, she can probably come up with a whole lot more.

Themes, puzzles, games, and international motifs are among an array of creative letter ideas at this site by Lisa Lightner, a special education advocate. (Note: Her site looks fabulous for any parents with special needs kids struggling with Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs.)

This Mama Loves is a frenzied site with irritating popups and ads and moving parts, but there’s worthwhile advice there. Among other points, she notes the importance of organizing your ideas beforehand.

Ask everyone in the family to make a list of the year’s notable events, and then narrow it down to the most significant. Think about the things you’d like to know about your friends’ families and leave out the kind of stuff that would make you gag or yawn. Go for quality rather than quantity. You could write about the events in chronological order or devote a paragraph to each family member. But if you reach the end of page one before you’re finished, it’s time to stop and start editing things out. Anything over one page is overkill.

That last point about limiting to one page is a good one although, ahem, I’ve been known to break it. My husband quietly sighs when he sees I’ve moved on to Page Two and doesn’t seem much appeased when I point out that it’s double-sided, so I’m not wasting paper.

My “organization” consists of looking over our Google calendar for the past year. Most folks highlight travel, and that’s fine, but it occurred to me a while ago that travel isn’t the only barometer of a year’s life lived. The calendar reminds me about the fabulous lecture series on Shakespeare and Marlowe that I took, my brother’s outrageously complicated dental work requiring multiple summits between his dentist and orthodontist, and losses we’ve suffered.

The above-noted Mama site covers another rule I’ve broken:

If a family member has been very ill or even passed away, a holiday letter is not the place to announce it to people who don’t already know. If there’s someone on your list who isn’t aware but you think would like to know, add a handwritten note on the card or letter, or better yet, pick up the phone. If omitting mention of a loss seems wrong, then you might simply say, for example, “as most of you know, our dear Aunt Betty passed away in April and we all did a day of community service in her honor.”

In my case, ours is a small, close-knit family with members who have a wide network of loved ones spread out across distance and time, so when I lost three or four key members, I devoted a considerable amount of space to this news. In my defense, I’ve cut back, and if I had it to do over, I would have better adhered to the above noted advice.

Multiple online resources stress the need to avoid bragging, including a page at The Parenting Squad, which offers five tips on what not to do. Another of those five tips circles back ’round to a motif I addressed above:

Write a Letter, Not a Novel. Keep your letter to one page if at all possible. Remember that your readers are used to reading short status updates and 140-character tweets. An actual letter requires a new level of attention. Keep it light, keep it fun, and for the love of the holiday season—keep it short.

This oft-repeated advice brings to mind a comment from that sage intellect from Wonderland, Alice, who notes “I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.”

Another standard bit of advice I can offer you? Question Authority. I leave it up to you to decide if that means these online experts—or me.

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Lagniappe: The end of the calendar year approaches, which means more inundations of requests for money. Charity Navigator offers a rich search mechanism you can use to drill as shallowly or as deeply as you like. Menus include cause, ratings, beacon, state, and more, and many have submenus. If you don’t want to have to think that hard, you can select one of the current hot-button causes highlighted. I selected the cause Animal Welfare and the “beacon” Impact and Results. I got thousands, so I added a size: small. That got me down to a manageable 17, one of which is the Allen County Animal Rescue Foundation in La Harpe, Kansas, which, to clarify for those not familiar with the state, is near the big city of Iola.