Life is What Happens
By Lisa Zaslow Segelman
The weather outside may be frightful, but nothing is scarier than what lurks in your mailbox in December – the annual holiday letter.
Such chatty missives remain among the few modern communiques that still arrive by snail mail. They’re meant to catch up old friends, distant relatives, and college roommates on the writer’s lives.
The tone of these letters can be astounding: glowing reports of children’s accomplishments and details of medical problems that you can live without. No one really wants to hear about your foot surgery or your delayed flight, especially if it was for a last-minute holiday getaway to Aspen when your stay-cation included redeeming points at Wawa for a Shorti.
These communications are not just from folks who celebrate Christmas. Writers from other faiths who maybe aren’t as stressed with untangling Christmas lights and baking cookies are stapling and stamping holiday letters, too.
“If I wanted to know about these folks, I’d call, text or email them,” says my friend Emily (her name has been changed to protect friendships with friends she doesn’t care to read about).
For years my husband and I read these letters out loud and posted the accompanying photos on the fridge. A friend did us one better. “We do a group reading of these sappy sum-ups at a neighbor’s house,” said Lou Vaccaro of Hillsborough. “The theme of the letters we get is, ‘we’re so great.’”
Sick of hearing about catapulting careers and folks receiving keys to the city, my husband asked, “Why are everyone else’s kids Rhodes Scholars and Peace Corps volunteers while our kids can’t spend one weekend peaceably together?”
That’s when we decided to send out a “reality holiday letter,” a tell-some expose of life at our house. The goal was to offset the excessively sentimental treatises sent by regular letter writers. Part of the inspiration was the advent of reality TV. We knew we could do one-better than those scripted reality shows that were anything but the real story.
In one of our first letters, we struggled with our 9-year-old daughter, Talia’s, aversion to violin lessons because “all the notes were on the side.” That same year we grumbled through 6-year-old Alana sucking her thumb at home, but not at school because “there’s no principal at home.”
In 2007 she urged me to stop tutoring the kid across the street because “he’s smart enough.” In 2008 after our Jacques Cousteau period (and buying the fish tank, pumps and pagodas that go with it), our kids informed us “fish aren’t cuddly.” That began a long road to getting our real dog Eddie, now almost 17 years old.
Keeping a diary is challenging even for a writer, so this decades-long tradition has also served as a chronicle of our family’s life, which has had more than its share of “Cheaper by the Dozen” movie moments. When the details start to fade in our memories, our growing family will have the letters, and accompanying photo cards, as part of their holiday tradition, too.
For content we used our own judgment in the beginning, when our kids were 9, 7 and 4. Now at 30, 28 and 25 they get out their red pens. “Mom, you can’t say that!”
Still, in this year’s letter I recount meeting my now 28-year-old, violin-adverse daughter’s boyfriend for the first time.
“We had barely exchanged ‘nice to meet yous’ when I noticed that I still had one of those heavy wire gauge tags on my new shoes, yes, the tags that are only removable at the store or if you carry your father’s toolbox with you at all times. I was happy that her boyfriend is 6’1” and that it’s a long way from his sightline to the ground because I looked like Martha Stewart breaking parole.”
Are we the only letter writers who take the reality route?
When I suggested to my brother, a writer at The Wall Street Journal, that he do a story on the subject he found a 1998 Ann Landers column that took to task “ghastly” holiday letters written by braggarts. He also interviewed Stephen Banks, a University of Idaho professor who conducts an ongoing holiday letter study, which concluded that many writers look at this kind of correspondence as a form of self-therapy.
Now that the professors might be analyzing our letter line by line, I’ve been thinking if we have a deeper reason than combating pomposity for our annual letter.
Like the TV show about nothing, our missives are filled with unimportant, Seinfeld-esque details. But as long as we can write about spilled soy sauce in the car that made it smell like a sushi restaurant whose air-conditioning broke, I know it’s been a very good year. And that’s something I want to share.
If you have even a smidge of a flair for storytelling, consider creating your own reality holiday letter. Instead of recounting your trip to the Galapagos Islands and the details of the multiple degrees your kids achieved, entertain your friends with details of your lives they can actually relate to. Pick plumbing problems, in-law challenges, or cooking disasters (maybe you have your pizza place on speed dial).
In the past two decades I’ve found that my mishaps, embarrassments and calamities call to mind my readers’ own challenges and they’re comforted by knowing they’re not alone.
Tongue-in-cheek is just the medium. The message each year is the same – we are grateful that most years we get to sweat the small stuff. Sharing the details helps us remember what’s really important – health, friends, family, and the well-being of people we used to know, and finding enough quarters in the couch to take the shortcut over the Margate Bridge.
