Pity the Annual Holiday Letter. Missteps and writing tips
By: Kimberly Garts Crum
Tags: Personal Essay, Writing Tips, Christmas, Letters, Holidays

Pity the annual Holiday letter, which is sincere but often parodied. Generally, most of us would rather not hear about Katy’s breast enhancement or Ethan’s SAT scores. Yet, a thoughtfully composed Christmas letter can be entertaining for the audience and therapeutic for the writer. What follows are observations, learned from writing holiday letters for 25 years.

The holiday letter is a eulogy memorializing the passing of each year. The best funeral eulogies tell the audience stories about a person’s life. How the deceased person befriended waiters, liked to whistle, adopted stray dogs, baked flaky piecrusts, or prized a collection of Elvis memorabilia. Like the eulogy, the holiday letter tells stories.

As an example, here is part of one holiday letter describing the aftermath of an ice storm—“We slept fully-dressed under two down comforters. John wore his insulated ski-pants (outfitted with a microchip, in case of an avalanche). We rescued a pork roast from the room-temperature freezer and I cooked the roast with sauerkraut on top of a gas burner. Fully outfitted in coats and hats, we consumed our pork roast by candlelight . . . I especially remember the peculiar pleasure of doing six loads of laundry in a laundromat with a gathering of fellow Old Louisville citizens, all of us cherishing the florescent light, toasty heat registers, and the promise of clean underwear.”

The annual letter is first-person prose written by a specific narrator to a target audience. Three things make the essay personal — The narrator. The details. The unique perspective. Here are some craft tips for your next letter.

Know your audience. Most holiday letter audiences are a diverse mix of persons who we love, have befriended us, or with whom we have business relationships. The letter writer must try to compose a missive that will appeal to all groups. As with most compositions, wise writers consider the audience when telling stories. For example, your loved ones already know about your hysterectomy, and your acquaintances would rather not know. Even though the concept of privacy seems an antiquated value in today’s reality television world, there is still something known, in text-speak, as T.M.I.

Prefer details to generalities. “The specific is universal,” according to creative writing teachers. The writer should prefer details to generalities. For example, if one wants to describe how a fractured ankle ruined a ski-vacation, she might state the obvious — “The broken ankle ruined the vacation. My leg hurt and I was stuck on the couch.” Alternatively, the writer might describe the event in the following way — “I sat on the couch, my leg elevated for five days, watching episode-after-episode of Law & Order, with a glass of water and a bottle of Demerol at my side.” The latter description includes specific details, helps the audience visualize the writer on the couch, and shows the ruined vacation.

Prefer First Person. The third-person pronoun might be all right for Miss Manners, the advice columnist (e.g. “Miss Manners thinks your husband is a lout for giving you a Swiffer Sweeper for your anniversary”). But the use of third-person pronouns distances the writer from the reader and seems disingenuous. Readers can quickly discern who wrote the letter, because the writer has a unique point-of-view. Consider the following example: “This has been the first year of our empty nest, and Kim misses the socks and shoes that once littered the hallway.” Most readers would guess Kim, the mother, wrote that sentence. The “I” pronoun feels personal and authentic.

Prefer stories of inconvenience to grand adventures. Readers enjoy complex characters whose behaviors, thoughts, and actions are flawed. So be careful not to brag. One year, my daughters and husband critiqued a paragraph in which I wrote, under a vacation photo— “Here we are at the Ponte Vecchio, in Florence, just before touring the Academia to see the Statue of David.” The family complained in unison. “We sound snooty!” And so, I changed the letter to describe the discomforts of our foreign travel — being scolded in cafes for sitting down when we had paid the stand-up price; getting lost in our rental Fiat Multipla, a uniquely ugly car, on winding roads with inscrutable signage.

Holiday letters often have unintended consequences for the writer. Through storytelling, she discovers the meaning of the year’s events. I really do miss the litter of socks, shoes, and coats on the hallway floor. And during the ice storm I was comforted to rediscover the simple pleasures of warm heat registers and the promise of clean underwear.

As I eulogized that difficult year, which included a wind storm, then an ice storm that destroyed trees and left us without electricity for a week, I surprised myself with an observation— “Perhaps God was pruning more than trees.”

There is serendipity in writing the annual holiday letter, which helps the writer recognize the importance of the past, and prepares her to move forward with another year of life unpredictable.