The Christmas Letter

We used to get one of those Christmas chain letters from one of Will’s uncle’s family every year. I didn’t get one last year, but then they forgot to invite Katy and I to the extended family Christmas dinner until the afternoon before they held it too. I didn’t miss the letter. It was one of those impossibly irritating laundry lists of self-wonder and inner rapture that could make a Nobel Laureate feel inadequate and socially awkward. Will’s cousins were (possibly still are - I wouldn’t know) paragons of just about everything, and his aunt and uncle more pious and less humble about it then they should be. I asked Will if he ever felt as though all that bragging was a backhanded insult and he confessed that he never read the whole letter but merely hung up the card it arrived in. Which makes me wonder, even now, what the purpose of these letters are? I have never written one but Rob and I have pondered, mostly without producing anything definite other than perhaps we should go easy on the mention of death as it’s not a very Christmassy thing - more of an Easter thing really - and consider alternate versions for those people who don’t know how the whole extended family things works for us blendeds. I just want to write something simple. Something that won’t trigger anyone’s gag reflex and yet still manages to convey a sense of our year. But, of course, it’s only been six months officially. I don’t think new couples gush about their courtships in holiday letters, right?

Frankly, I don’t know what the purpose of the holiday letter is, and it will be a “holiday” letter because even if it were written, printed, stuffed, stamped, addressed and sitting in the post office this very minute - no one would see it before the new year at the earliest. Perhaps it should be a coming attractions? What we are looking forward to in the new year.

Dear Family and Friends,
As this new year begins, exciting changes await our family as we organize for our move to Texas.......

Okay, yeah, this sounds suspiciously like what a recap might only substitute “Canada” for “Texas”.

What’s wrong with a card? Snow and fauna? Or Santa and elves? Or a picture. Lisa and John sent us a picture postcard of the two of them in front of, actually to the side of, a really big rock. In Australia. I think. But still, way more interesting than any holiday letter because I would rather see them somewhere as opposed to reading about them somewhere, if that makes sense.

How about a collage? Pictures from all the big event of the year (minus everything to do with death, of course)? And now we are into the unwieldily and project-like which means no one would get their greeting until February at the earliest and I don’t think these kinds of things can double as Valentine’s unless they are to your mother.

Maybe I just don’t have what it takes to write these kinds of things. Odd that a blogger schooled in the practice of self-revelation can’t brag and sicken her family and friends except online, but possibly the truth. So, I guess I will consider the blog in its entirety my holiday letter to you all. And to all now, a goodnight.