Good Morning.
I'm working on my Christmas newsletter or whatever we call these annual card inserts that brag about family members and trips and boats and who knows what else and that shoves reality under the rug. Deck the halls with boughs of glitter.
I get a fair number of holiday epistles. One of them, so short it could fit on an index card, tells me the senders are still alive and Merry Christmas. Others are lengthy travelogues with details about flight delays, lousy hotels, and language barriers. People write about their gardening, golf, and Mah Jongg and how much better they feel now that they're doing yoga and drinking vegetable smoothies. From just these few lines you should be able to conclude that the people who send out newsletters are old.
Younger generations prefer a card with a family photo. My daughter's fridge and kitchen cabinets are plastered every year with glossy, smiley pictures of everyone she has ever met, but they're all under the age of fifty. Apart from these once-a-year mailings addressed by hand and affixed with a stamp, people born after 1970 rely, of course, on social media, cell phones, and texting to communicate throughout the year. The Medicare set, some of us anyway, do not understand the concept of having 2368 friends with whom we have never had any physical and verbal contact over lunch, for example. We send tangible birthday, anniversary, graduation, get well, and sympathy cards and we write Christmas newsletters and mail them out to the three or four dozen people we actually know, first of all because we have the time and secondly, because we feel the need to reassure ourselves that we're still able to express ourselves with reasonable coherence. Some of us dodder into the office supply store to get our masterpieces printed on holiday paper with borders of holly or trumpets, but those are the folks who find it possible to confine their remarks to one page. The rest of us use plain old computer paper and ramble on as long as we dare.
It's not easy putting together one of these letters. My grandchildren are at an age where they're winning things and I feel an irresistible urge to share information about their successes because in some corner of my brain a) I want to believe my genes are totally responsible for their talent and brilliance; or b) I am living through them vicariously because I haven't won anything in half a century. Actually the only two things I ever won were a high school music citation and a card table and four folding chairs playing Bingo at Fort Carson, Colorado in 1965. The trick is to not make the letter cutesy or obnoxious. I had a paragraph about the president and questioned why a tanning bed needed to be in the White House. I deleted it. I also talked about my blog and said that I had lost several subscribers who obviously preferred to read The Drudge Report. I took that one out also.
My boxes of cards are supposed to be delivered sometime this week. I ordered them from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and they feature a young woman from a time when people decorated a Christmas tree with fruit. I look at her and say guess what, honey, help is coming to get you out of the parlor, but I also love the gentility that is sorely missing from today's culture. Inside my cards will be an 8x11 sheet of paper with commentary very selectively compiled to make you think we're the Waltons. We are not.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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