Our first Christmas as a married couple, which would have been December 1995, I started the tradition of sending out Christmas cards for both Wayne and I. Back then I picked cards with funny or clever pictures, wrote a short, quick note to the recipients, and mailed them.
Christmas 1999 marked the first time I attempted a Christmas letter, which I’d previously never had much respect for. Most of the ones we received painted an entirely too rosy picture of friends and family living entirely too perfect lives. We knew the letters meant well but were stretching things a bit.
However, something I read by Sarah Ban Breathnach in Simple Abundance about Christmas letters changed my attitude towards them. She explained how most of the letters she received were ones like I mentioned above. However, there was one friend who wrote an absolutely magnificent letter that she looked forward to receiving every year and eagerly settled down to read the moment she received it.
The difference was this letter was honest. Highlights as well as trials were detailed and the message for a merry Christmas was always delivered with the utmost sincerity.
I wanted to write a letter like that. I wasn’t sure if I could, but I wanted to try.
So I set out using quotes to highlights sections of my letter and detailed the scary, trying, exciting year we’d had selling our house and moving across country from Phoenix to Jacksonville. (Maybe that’s why I also wanted to attempt a letter. This was a huge event in our lives and I didn’t want to relate it again and again in every card by hand.)
Every year since then I try to come up with a good letter. Some years I succeed at making them unique, other years not so much.
One year I set it up like a newsletter, others it’s been a regular letter on festive paper, and last year I had caricature cards with all of our images printed on them (Wayne and myself as well as Murphy and Kitty) to stow the letters in.
I’ll probably end up doing some sort of letter this year again, but I’m itching to take a family picture to send out as holiday cards. However, that might be pressing it.
The cats are definitely tolerating each other’s company better, but trying to get them to sit still together for a picture? Could be disastrous. And then there’s the problem of being married to a Scrooge… Getting him to participate in the picture would be the most challenging of all!
Question to Readers
What sort of holiday greetings do you send out?
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