Christmas Letter: Hopelessly old-school or charmingly retro?

I wrote my first paper on a word processor in 1986. It was my senior year in high school. Although the PC, such as it was, sat in our home in suburban Columbia, the printer was at my father’s office in Baltimore. This necessitated a mad dash into the city on due day to transport the floppy disk, print, and then drive back.

Deadlines were very dramatic in those days, children. There was none of this clicking and sending. Oh there were squealing tires and home-run slides into the classroom. Students would arrange their schedules to avoid the teacher who required footnotes, rather than endnotes.

When I got to college. True story. I had to quick find a boyfriend who could type so that he could format my humble offerings, hand-written on loose-leaf. He was small, trim, furry, and bestowed with the magic of logging onto our school’s internal vax system. For shame, I would wake this poor hobbit up from slumber if I had a deadline.

Years later, when conducting my first job hunt, I had a similar relationship with a guy who worked at Kinko’s. He road a motorcycle and looked like Kiefer Sutherland. But the thing that got me was his way with bullet points.

I am not, what you’d call an early adopter. I was wooed by a man with good penmanship and a mastery of the mix tape. When we married in 1995 was the first time I owned a CD player. My beloved’s i-pod, which trickled down to me when he upgraded, and which he lovingly pre-loaded with prog rock and dreamy girls just for me, sits idle in my glove compartment. And don’t get me started on the proliferation of remote controls.

So, as the curtain closes on the first decade of the century in which I have never felt at home, I contemplate the custom of the Christmas letter. Is there any utility to wrapping up the year’s news in one self-aggrandizing epistle, when it won’t be news to anyone who follows my blog or stalks my FB? Is it ecologically sound to send so much mail? And who should have the honor of receiving it, now that the line between friend and “friend” has become so blurry.

What do you think? If I wrote one, would you want a copy?

What didn't make it into the Christmas letter

My friends and I are at an exhausting time of life, it seems. Where, not five years ago, our Christmas letters were full of deep reflection and high spiritual (not to mention, material) ambition; this year’s batch sounds more like, whew, we made it out of the year with the same crew we brought in, and not too battered by the journey.

I am humbled to note that my Jones, who had the most obvious milestones to report -- starting kindergarten, learning to read -- hearkens back to but one event of 2007. And that is, the day Mom popped the zit on my bum.

Why has this event taken on such epic proportions in his 6-year-old cranium? Well now, it WAS a monstrous zit. And it was already established that any assault on his bodily integrity was cause for great alarm (To his credit, he’s wailed inconsolably when I’ve cut myself, as well). But I think that the most likely reason of all is that the telling of the tale has tapped something deep and ancestral. You can almost hear the drumbeat by the fire.

Because, logistically, he could not bear eyewitness to the goings-on, he has been forced to imagine the sparks and lava and dragons that were unleashed into the world on that fateful day. And the story grows with each retelling, until he has me wrestling the demons to the ground.

Yes, he’s my little Ralph Wiggum. Remember Ralph Wiggum on his discovery of a couple sneaking a kiss in a closet? “They were making babies and I saw one of the babies and he smiled at me.”

Only the ending remains the same, the most chilling part, “And then, there was a little bit of blood. And you had to get a bandage.”

So long as I write the Christmas letter, you’ll hear about scout camp and promotions at work. But to hear Jones tell it, we emerge from this year panting from cataclysmic battles. And I can’t help but consider that Jones has it right.