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The clock is ticking. It's time to write my annual holiday letter
The air is chilly, the leaves have fallen, and I’m getting sick of pumpkin spice lattes. All this can mean only one thing: It’s time for me to worry about my family’s annual holiday letter.
Of all the stressful things about the holidays, I can’t complain about this one because it is entirely self-inflicted. Every year I feel compelled to write a letter that is informative, entertaining and clever.
I’ve been doing this for over a decade and can’t even remember what madness possessed me the first time. Generally, my modus operandi is to do the bare minimum within socially acceptable standards. I’ll bring a bag of chips to a potluck. I don’t sort my laundry. My go-to makeup for a fancy event is Chapstick, because I have neither the time nor the patience to apply a bold red lip. I really should just find a photo of my family where everyone’s eyes are open, slap it into a non-denominational card template and pour myself a tumbler of wine.
Yet I started this letter thing and now friends and family keep me going with positive feedback. “Loved your letter!” “Always excited to get your card!”
I don’t want to disappoint them, even though every year it gets more difficult to write something original. It was a lot more fun in the early days. One year, I wrote a business-like annual report complete with pie charts.
The year I made up “Achievement Awards” for each family member, my teen daughter played so many video games she won my award for “Most Likely to Become One With a MacBook Air Due to Uninterrupted Physical Contact.” For my husband, I created “The Sisyphus Award for Moving Snow from Point A to Point B,” noting that “this award recognizes his relentless battle against the ice boulders left by the city plow at the end of our driveway. Laura watched his progress through the frosted windows while sipping cups of tea, falling more in love every moment,” I wrote, referring to myself in the third person.
Adoring sentiments like that are balanced by snarky captions for the pictures I select, like this one of my fitness-obsessed husband “targeting workouts for whatever part of his body is not currently recovering from a surgical procedure made necessary by too much exercise.”
Last year, I was quite proud of my eldest daughter’s new job as a software engineer, yet this is what I wrote underneath her photo in the letter: “Working hard or playing Tetris? Who can tell?”
And when my younger daughter studied abroad in Ireland, her caption marked the one major failure of her semester overseas: "Never did see a leprechaun."
While preparing to write this essay, I scrounged up copies of the missives I’ve written over the years, and they aren’t all gems. Who knows what I was thinking in 2013, when I drafted a newsy update in the rhyming format of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” that included the following stanza:
Now as the weather begins to turn colder
Tom and I strive to resist getting older.
He heads to the gym at zero dark thirty
This keeps his joints from getting too hurty.
Yikes. My sincerest apologies to Clement Clarke Moore. And to my husband. Apparently, the only tidbits I ever share about him involve exercise and injuries. Believe me, he is so much more than that (he also shovels snow!).
Now here I am, facing the pressure and deadline once again. And procrastinating so much about writing the letter that I’m currently writing about writing the letter, but not actually writing the letter.
So why do I keep at this? Because in real life, I’m a zealous introvert who is most comfortable smiling and nodding while others hold court. But in writing, I can unleash my inner entertainer and try to get a chuckle out of my friends. Nothing pleases me more than hearing from them that I’ve done it. My family has graciously served as my fodder.
The task is getting objectively harder. The kids don’t live at home anymore, our pets have passed on, and we are two middle-aged empty nesters living in the suburbs. My biggest accomplishment this year might be remembering to get my cars’ state inspection done on time. Incidentally, they both failed and needed repairs to pass, and — not to brag — but I handled that with impressive aplomb. Perhaps I’ll put that in the letter. At least the cars won’t fuss when I try to take their photo.
I have faith that I’ll somehow pull this off in time. The reality of my deadline will hit when I sip my first peppermint mocha of the season. I’ll drink it while praying to the writing gods for inspiration, because the honest truth is I do not have a picture of my whole family with our eyes open. I’m either going to write an incredible holiday letter or just send out a picture of my cars wearing their new inspection stickers.
