The Christmas Letter

I _hate_ the Christmas letter.

With the exception of decorations before Halloween, it is the one thing that I truly detest about Christmas.  I honestly don't know what it is.  Perhaps it's the feeling that the card is more of an advertisement about someone's past year in a very mass-produced type of manner...perhaps it's just that it's more information than I care to know about people I've barely seen in the past 10 years.

You go to get the mail, and instead of those monotonous white/blue bill envelopes and other mass marketing postcards, there it is:  a personalized card address just to you.  Even if you don't send them yourself, find yourself a little bit happy just to get one.

You find that you have at least half a smile as you tear open the envelope.

And then there it is:

The Christmas Letter.

It's a card with some message that isn't even signed to you- just someone's signature and a printout of single-spaced, mass-produced synopsis of what someone did this year...because you weren't involved in their lives to know.

Isn't that saying something?

If you don't have time to see them during the year, why would you want to read an annual memoir of the whole family?

But, let's say that you don't feel that way- that you don't mind the letter.

Have you ever been left out of it?  I think that it was leaving a huge event off (like the death of a mutual father/grandfather) that really turned me off of the Christmas Letter.

I tried looking up the origins, but the only hits I got were church sites:  a modification of the "Letter to Santa", but since the churches don't believe in Santa, they support drivelous digests being sent out to keep in touch with all those people who don't attend their church...yet.  And when I saw these sites, it wasn't surprising to me.  It was just another "that figures".  Yet another way the churches continue to destroy the original celebration of the shortest day of the year.