Brag your way through Christmas letter
By Ralph Shafer
Denver Post Staff Writer
Dec. 10, 2000 -
It's time to write it again - that Christmas card letter. You know, the single-spaced-sheet on both sides thing that keeps falling out of the arriving Christmas cards! To start yours, you need an attention-getting hook or else your potential readers won't glance beyond the "hello there again." Or worse, they say they will save the letter to read later. Maybe the day the tree comes down.
Opening qualifiers that might grab them are your family feats of the year:
- "I guess you knew we all hiked across the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the heat of last August." Here you dwell on stamina.
- "Joe signed us all up to try a sky-dive free fall near Mount St. Helens." Here you dwell on newly acquired skills nobody else has.
- "Susie fought the hammerhead shark all the way to the beach while all we could do was watch." Here you dwell on family cohesion.
- "It was wild, but we'd all go through that whitewater rafting again any time." Dwell on adventure.
In the next paragraph, you can slow the pace. Apologize because last year had only 12 months; that's meant to be funny. This can lead to comments wondering just where all the days went, what really happened to the fleeting weeks, and here it is holiday time again. Make some oblique reference to the note you did send with the cards last year. Not that anyone will have kept it. But it shows an effort to be in touch. Even though much of this is bound to be redundant, it sets the tone. And implies in a nice way that it's pretty hard to write letters to everyone all year long.
The next important section should re-identify family members. Outside of the close relatives, very few of those receiving your card with letter will remember everyone in your family. Be careful not to be too direct for that could imply they don't remember. So this part should avoid bits such as:
- "Bob is 13 now and the school's baseball, soccer and basketball mainstay. He'll move into grade eight in January."
It's better like this: "Bob, our teenager, is doing marvelously on the ball club and will be carrying a fine grade point average into his last year here." This way, his athletic prowess is set up for any sport played with a ball. About his age in grade, don't explain. Daughters are a little harder to categorize. But here, vague is best.
- "We are all excited about Susie finishing up in organic chemistry and taking that job in Passaic." This way your readers won't know whether you are talking about Susie's work in high school or in the state university or in some correspondence course. And besides, New Jersey is very hard to check up on, if they care.
Your holiday-time letter readers can usually remember a husband's first name because it's always on those 1,000-for-$1.49 stickers used every year on the envelopes.
Very little that's explicit need be said about him. Just give out with:
- "Joe had a fine year" No one needs to know at what. A short, positive statement on his situation tells readers you probably still have some prosperity, happiness, well-being and maybe even a new four-wheel drive. Of course, for emphasis, you could add something like:
- "And because of his wonderful surprise promotion to assistant vice president, we are moving to L.A." And enough is enough. Now it is important to put some quasi-truths in about yourself. After all, many of the 8 1/2-by-11photo copied letters on plain white sound a good deal alike. A good holiday scribe has the obligation to insert a strong personal image:
- "My ceramics are selling so well that I am thinking of opening up in Sausalito, too." The "too" may give them pause. They won't remember that you worked creatively in clay much less glazed, fired, crazed and kilned. All right, so you did sell some of the things you made in that night adult education class. Soap dishes.
To make your readers feel that they are getting inside facts on the extended family, you should insert short comments about individuals' health conditions. Maybe like so:
- "Chloe is fine now."
- "These days, of course, nothing affects Jose's lifestyle except that nonfruit diet." Lines like these can create a "what does this mean anyhow?" discussion. Some readers will guess those first names are your live-in help. Some will say, "Isn't it nice that you are taking in foreign exchange students." And some will say you always were a klutzy name-dropper, even though it is the season of goodwill to all. They don't know that Chloe is the new poodle that you got last January and had spayed; and that Jose is the friendly Mynah bird caged in the window of the family room.
The travel paragraph should be very big with no holding back. Don't be too detailed about place-names, routes, costs, modes of travel and people you met. Just give spotty nonessentials:
- "We just piled into the car that weekend and headed for
Disneyland. Well, you know what the weather is like here in July. What should happen to us, but the old faithful air conditioner on the car conked out. Can you imagine getting Blythe in that 112 degree heat? Everyone was a good soldier though, and only Pete got a touch of the heat." No need to say Pete was the pet garden lizard the kids took along in a perforated show box.
Something with an international flavor gives added spice to the travel bit:
- "Oh, yes I forgot to tell you that Susie went to India last summer with the Experiment, Little Joie was asked to come back to that summer camp in Canada as a junior counselor - imagine, for pay! I had a week last May in Jamaica but it rained, and I guess you got the card I wrote from there..." Sometimes in the travel section, you can stir up interest by mentioning places nobody knows anything about. What you do is select some faroff country. Then you think back to see if someone you knew touched base (or almost) there:
- "My brother-in-law visited us for a few days on his way back from that oil platform in Djakarta where he couldn't take the family. He brought us some fabulous dress material and ceremonial heads with pop eyes like you have never seen." When coming toward the end of a holiday letter, it's a good idea to put in some disconnected bits reflecting the full life:
- "We moved into our new home the weekend of the flash flood. Because the driveway was all gumbo, most of it came on in the house. We had to replace all the carpets and sand the floors. Oh yes, Jackie and her three youngsters are living in Athens, Ga., now where her husband is stationed. We saw them just before school started, and she's expecting again in April. What a gal. You knew, I guess that Sue and Janet were married..."
Your readers won't have known it of course. They don't remember Sue or Janet. In fact, this far down in your letter your readers could have lost the entire thread of what you have been writing about. For a proper complimentary close, you need something on a holiday theme. Be sure to promise you'll write sometime during the next year, especially before the holidays.
Then it's good practice to indent quite a lot to show the letter is coming to an end. Write words like "as ever," "all our best," "let's hear from you soon," "next year will be great," and so on. Run off about 50 copies, sign you name (nickname is better) on each one, fold each letter to fit inside the Christmas card envelope.
During this last collating phase, try to avoid commenting to the family about the rising cost of postage and how it was cheaper if you mailed your holiday cards third class or with the flaps unsealed. Probably it was illegal, too, to insert letters.
Maybe those were the days.
Ralph Shafer is a freelancer who writes from Denver.
