My mailbox is always full in December– crammed with catalogs and brimming with bills. But I’m also sure to find Christmas cards along with the credit card statements. I admire the few who send handwritten notes each year, although if I were in their shoes, my great intentions would fizzle after a dozen or so cards. I’d end up carrying around the guilt until next year, just like I’m still carrying around the shame of never finishing my wedding thank you notes a dozen years ago. So personal notes to 100+ are not my style, but neither are cards signed only with the sender’s name or the only slightly better alternative of a family picture with no note. If I only hear from you once a year– make it good!
For many people, that leaves the alternative of the much-disparaged form letter. It’s the perfect way to get a whole bunch information out to a whole bunch of people, but the results are sometimes cringe-worthy. They’re often either too long or too braggy or too obviously unproofread (or all three). There are plenty of things I’m not good at, but I’m pretty darn good at the Christmas form letter. If the prospect of writing your letter has you sweaty-palmed and palpitating, here are some tips to give you confidence this holiday season:
1) Don’t try to do too much.
My mom has a tradition of writing a family newsletter each year. It’s several pages long, laid out lots of color pictures and articles highlighting her kids and grandkids. It looks like she paid someone big bucks to put it together. But she hates writing it. She puts it off until she can’t put it off any longer and then works on it in a frenzy until it’s done. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.
2) Pick a theme.
So many of the form letters I receive resemble a bulletproof list of the year’s accomplishments, which gets a little boring after the twentieth letter. One thing that works for me is picking a theme for the year’s letter. I write an introductory paragraph that introduces the theme, and then include a short paragraph on each member of the family, which ties in somehow to that theme. A few years ago, I assigned each person in the family to a character in the Nutcracker, and wrote about the characteristics the fictional character had in common with the family member. For example:
The swashbuckling Nutcracker Prince is a natural fit for Bryce (5 ½), who can most often be found with a light saber in his hand. The Star Wars craze hit our house, and Bryce would much rather answer to Anakin than his own name. He started kindergarten this year and also played soccer for the first time this fall, and freely admits that his favorite part of playing was getting his trophy at the end of the season.
This December, our youngest daughter would not cooperate for Christmas pictures, so I decided (by default) to make imperfection the theme of year. Here’s my intro (and the picture we’re sending with it):
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I’m not above coaxing, bribing or threatening to get my kids to smile for the annual holiday picture. The promise of an ice cream cone is usually all it takes to get everyone to sit still and look in the same direction for at least one shot. We live far from our families and many friends, so the Christmas card picture is the only glimpse into our lives that some people get. If I’ve only got one chance each year to show us off, I want to do it well.
Unfortunately, there was no doing it well this year. Theoretically, we should have gotten a great picture. All of the kids had matching outfits from Grandma, which miraculously still fit from last year. But we forgot to take into consideration Maren’s iron will. She didn’t want to put her dress on, hated her tights, and absolutely refused to sit near her brothers and sister. I tried taking the kids’ pictures on Sunday afternoon, and she was okay as long as everyone else gave her about ten feet of personal space, which wasn’t exactly conducive to harmonious compositions. We tried again on Monday, this time with a friend enlisted to take pictures. Although her photography skills are better than mine, she didn’t fare much better in getting Maren to smile or sit.
This year, you’re not getting a wonderful holiday picture from the Miners, but you’re getting an accurate glimpse into our messy, loud, imperfect lives. Sure, the background looks great and the outfits are cute, but perfect it ain’t. It seems an apt metaphor for our lives in 2008—we’re trying our best, but chaos often reigns.
Yeah, this year’s intro is a little long, but it still works, doesn’t it? Please tell me it does, because 110 copies of it are on their way to mailboxes all over America right now.
3) Let the personalities of your family members come through.
Highlighting a whole year’s worth of accomplishments without sounding boastful can be hard, and with some family members, particularly babies, it’s hard to find something to write that will be interesting to anyone except the doting grandparents. So I try to pick one aspect of each child’s personality, and tie that into the things he or she has done during the year. I also include basic factual info– age/grade kind of stuff. This year, when considering my daughter, Annie, I could have written that she loves to read or takes ballet lessons or skipped first grade, but I abandoned all of those options as either too boastful or too boring (doesn’t every six-year-old take ballet?). Instead, I came up with this:
Annie (6) is our second-grade social networker. She contributes to the din at the house by gabbing on the phone with friends, practicing tap routines on kitchen’s tile floor, singing with the radio, and trying to best her big brother on the piano. If you email her (anniesfakeaddy@email.com) she’s sure to email back, and might even try to chat with you if she notices you’re online.
If you read closely, you can see that Annie’s paragraph focuses on noise, which goes back to the whole loud and messy theme for the year.
4) Write more than you’re going to use. Then cut.
I usually write two pages with the intention of sending one. Then I go through and cut and cut and cut (and readjust the font size) until it fits on the front of a single piece of paper.
5) Keep it short– but not too short.
We get form Christmas letters ranging in length from a couple of paragraphs to several pages. If you have a big family like we do, several sentences probably isn’t enough to capture a glimpse into the life of your family. But if it’s too long, people won’t read it. For our family of six, I can usually develop a theme, highlight family members, make important announcements and wish everyone well in about 600 words.
6) Wrap it up.
If you’ve established a theme for your Christmas letter, come back to that theme in your conclusion (Remember the five paragraph essay back in high school? It works here too). Here’s how I wrapped it up this year:
So there you have it—our lives are full and enriching, and, yes, a little messy. If you showed up at our door you’d probably find crumbs on the floor, dirty dishes in the sink, and lots of noise. In 2008 our Christmas card, with its imperfections, is a candid representation of our family life this year.
Wishing you (and us!) peace in the holiday season and in the new year.
6) Sit on it for a day or two.
If you write at the last minute, you’ll be forced to send it out without giving yourself a chance to mull it over. I wrote mine a week before I sent it off, then fine-tuned things several times during the week. I also enlisted my husband to read it before we hit print– he’s a much better proofreader than I am and invariably catches things I miss.
7) Emailing your letter is free!
Postage and printing too expensive? All stuffing and licking got you groaning? Email your friends the text of letter, attach a picture, and voila, you’re done! I’ve gotten a couple of Christmas cards by email already this year. I’ll admit that I love the hard copy (I put all of the pictures on a bulletin board in my laundry room and they make an otherwise unlovely place much more festive) but if it’s going to be email or nothing, sign me up for the email, please.
Now that I’ve told you what I like and what works for me? What do you like? What works for you?
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Yup. Yup. Yup. Yup. I agree with everything you’ve written here! Thanks for the succinct advice.
this year I am having each person write their own blurb. I will guarantee you that our 6 year old will take the opportunity to invite each and every recipient to her birthday party, May 17th, chocolate cupcakes will be served and puzzles are requested.
See? Much funnier than “Gwen played soccer and is starting basketball this year”
just in time for me to write my letter
ClistyB– That is brilliant! I’m going to do that next year!
A few years ago I realized that it was too much to do Christmas Cards in November/December because I had so much going on. So, now I send Valentine’s Day cards. January seems to be a fairly low key month, and I always have more time to spend on the letter and cards.
PLEASE I am begging you–do NOT try to write your your entire Christmas letter in iambic pentameter! I am so tired of getting weak poetry with a terrible rhyme scheme. You will not impress your friends. They’ll only groan and roll their eyes.
I hate the rhyming Christmas letters! For one thing, they don’t tell you anything. The writers are trying so hard to fit it all into a rhyme that you never learn what actually happened that past year.
I just wrote my entire letter and decided to scrap it. I want to be funny and self-depracating, but I’m afraid my humor comes across as edgy and whiny.
Last year I took the words “HAPPY HOLIDAYS” and wrote the letters vertically down the page, then used each letter as the beginning of a sentence. That worked really well and gave some organization to things beyond the typical “______ is five years old….”
I would love to have each person in my family write a section on themselves, but I think they would balk, especially my dh. So what I’ve decided to do is to come up with five questions/starters and let them answer. The topics will include things like Favorite Vacation Memory (of 2008), Funniest Moment, Proudest Accomplishment, Biggest Challenge Overcome, Vital Statistics, etc.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people only write about their kids and don’t include what they’ve been doing. Most of these are people we’ve known from way back, and while it’s fun to hear what their kids are up to, I want to know what they’ve been doing too!
Some of my favorites to read have been a “top ten list” and a quick blurb about each month of the year with some small pics.
I had a friend send a christmas letter that was a TV guide listing of what was on each night of the week. They used names of real shows and then had a short blurb about someone in their family that parodied the TV show title, and it was laid-out in the form of a TV guide too. An example was “Prison Break” John tries fervently to escape nursery every Sunday…will he succeed in the new year?
It was the most creative letter I’ve ever seen, and I read it over and over! It was hilarious!
Thank you!
My husband is in charge of the letter, since he’s the more creative writer. Some years we do a more straight-up version, other years we’ve done more. Once we used the font from “The Simpsons” to put our last name at the top and then created “epidodes” with little plot blurbs for each one. Another year my husband cataloged ours according to the Dewey Decimal system (He’s a librarian as well as a writer). Last year the only decent photo we had was from Halloween when we were all dressed as superheroes, so we put a little bit about each person’s “Super powers”. We try to be creative and I always cross my fingers that people don’t think it’s annoying or cheesy. And I agree about avoiding the rhyming thing–just don’t. Unless you could write an Elizabethan sonnet with proper meter and rhyme scheme. That would be cool.
One of my friends found a crossword puzzle on an Etsy page that she customized for her family. My (non-Mormon) bloggy friend Beth wrote a funny list of do’s and don’ts for Christmas letters. http://www.blogobeth.com/2008/11/tips-to-writing-great-holiday.html
One of my good friends wrote a parody letter one year and got a few offended responses. I thought that was a shame, as the parody was hilarious.
I feel like blogging should have changed the Christmas letter in some way. Like made it redundant or something.
This is my entire Christmas letter this year:
“read my blog, people!”
great ideas, guys!!! Keep ‘em coming. Jane, ITA with everything your friend said in her tips! It sounds like some of you are way more creative than I am.
I’m not doing anything this year in the way of cards, pictures or letters…for the first time in 30 years. It feels good right now (with a tiny touch of guilt) to have freed myself of all that surrounds getting cards and letters out, as I do love the keeping in touch with friends and family. This week I’m on a business trip, but I know I’ll be sad when I go home and see greetings coming in and know that no one is getting one from me.
Maybe I’ll have to rethink and shoot for a Valentine Day’s card!
The worst family letter to date that we’ve received was our friends telling about their year, through the eyes of their dog. Pictures and everything! The dog apparently was left home throughout the year while the family traveled extensively and we heard all about it! A year later there was a repeat. Year later, there was a divorce and we didn’t have to hear about it again!
Nice how-to. I think this can be very intimidating to people. Personally, I find amassing all the necessary addresses the hardest part. Why won’t my friends just settle down?
Another take on the subject:
http://www.mormonmentality.org/2008/12/08/public-service-christmas-mailings.htm
I was intrigued this take on NPR by a Catholic priest. I admit that after reading it, I changed the picture on my iPhoto created card . . .
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97854252
I’m surprised at the friend who doesn’t like to get pictures–I love getting them and feel a bit disappointed when a card arrives without a pic.
As far as the Catholic priest, well, my card this year has a picture of my family right next to a drawing of the Holy Family. I wonder how he’d feel about that?
ESO– Nice list.
So Deborah– I’ll bet he’d absolutely abhor the one I sent out in 2006 when I was due with baby #4 at Christmastime: http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e10/shelahminer/Christmascard20066.jpg. And yes, we used the picture to set the theme, and compared our kids to their Holy Family counterparts. Does that make me sacrilegious?
Shelah. I *love* it. Positively perfect
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I’m a BIG fan of the family picture — especially with friends scattered far and wide. But the article did get me thinking, about Advent in particular and about how cards can be a reflection of both my life without completely ignoring, well, Christ-mas. Also, since the Father Martin’s book– “My Life With Saints”–is quite simply the best spiritual memoir I’ve read, I felt I had to give his advice some reflection.
(Oh, and based on his sometimes irreverent sense of humor in the book, I think he’d love your card, Shelah!)
Thanks for the book recommendation, Deborah. I can always appreciate a good mix of serious and irreverent. I guess I should have read the article with more of an open mind. I was expecting crustiness, so that’s what I took away.
I send out a letter to the people I really like. And then I post the same letter as a page on my website and include links to the pages where there are photos about what I am talking about. So when I talk about a camping trip, you can click the link and go look at the pictures of the camping trip.
And blogging should definitely not make Christmas cards redundant. Christmas cards are a personal physical reminder that there is a friendship there and that you care about maintaining that friendship, even if it is only once a year, rather than just writing and hoping they happen to see it.
Great advice!
One thing I do (I’m a Grandma) is email my draft to my kids so they can suggest additions, corrections, and deletions. Since much (not all) of it is about them, I want them to be happy with the results! I limit mine to 1 page with pictures on the back.
Excellent advice Shelah although I will admit this makes me a little nervous about letter my card off to you!
I should also proofread my comments – meant to say “nervous about sending my letter off to you”
My favorite Christmas letters were
-a “wanted” poster type letter, with all the ‘crimes’ the family members were found involved in. The pic was an old-style mug shot type, sepia color and all. Hilarious while still being informative.
This year, my friend sent an I-spy pic with lots of random things in a dollhouse to describe what they did. I thought that was creative.
I, too, prefer not to get just pics…I really want to hear something from others. But I don’t really mind the typical summaries, either. And I’ll admit that I actually get a kick out of people’s attempts at poetry.
That said, these are good suggestions for someone who really wants to dig in and do it well.
Ack. Poetry. Gag.
Justine Dorton sends out tbe bestest letters ever, and this year I copied her and did my best to keep it as short as possible. I tried to say one funny thing about myself and my kids, and even the dog got in on this one. It was short and sweet. Hopefully not too boring, either. And seriously, I don’t care how good a writer you are, or how much fun you had in all your vacations or how many books you read, nobody wants to read more than one page about you. Seriously.
Courtney-
Your letter was fantastic this year! So cute!
Heather, your card was most excellent!
I find myself backlashing from all the cards we get that brag about peoples second homes, their new boats, their fabulous and varied trips all over the globe, etc. One card, a few years ago, actually said something about how they had been so righteous that the Lord had blessed them with a cabin in Park City.
Honestly, I don’t need that kind of piousness.
So, for me, shorter and more vague is better. And I guess I don’t imagine that anyone really cares if my 5 year old is really into Polly Pockets, so it’s just better to skip all that. We tend to not actually share anything that really has any gravitas to it. The people that we’re close to already know what’s going on in our lives. We’re basically just saying howdy to everyone else. But I could be completely off base. I usually am.
Wow. Good post. But intimidating. ITA also about the length being kept to one page. I feel like a bad mother when I can’t describe my children better. This year I tried to share one little vignette that showed their character. Except I did a bad job on my teenagers paragraph. I haven’t printed yet. Thanks for the help. Love you Segullah sisters.
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Yes its really good and best way to write a christmas letters.
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