Task 2: Christmas letter – yay or nay? Do you include a Christmas letter with your cards? Have you received any especially obnoxious or especially charming Christmas letters? If you want to share an excerpt with us, feel free!
Similar story as with (private) Christmas cards. While I still had the time to have penfriends all over the world (obviously, in the days before the internet), I used to include a Christmas letter to all of them every year, typed out (or later, written on my computer) at home, then photocopied and signed by hand. I did this all through university here in Bonn, the ten years of living and working in Berlin, and also during the first years of living in the U.S. By then, however, all our lives had changed a lot, email exchanges (with those whose email addresses you had) had more or less replaced postal communication, and we increasingly drifted apart — and that, alas, was the end of my Christmas letters.
Yet, I do have an example close at hand of a friendship, and of the sending of Christmas letters, surviving over decades and throughout all vicissitudes of life: My mom and I are still receive a Christmas letter from a friend whom she first met in Cambridge (where she was an au-pair in his mentoring professor’s home and where they bonded over their joint love of music), who since then repeatedly visited her / us in Germany, and who still makes a point of stopping by in Bonn for a few days every time he is in Germany. At 80+, he’s still in astoundingly good shape and still undertakes trips to every part of the globe every year — or he did until the beginning of the pandemic, anyway. He sends a Christmas letter to his friends every year, opening with a brief general comment on larger events (politics, society, etc.), and then summing up how the year has gone for each member of his immediate family (written in the third person for all family members alike, including himself, with him going last) — even if there have been meetings or telephone calls over the course of the year, so his friends are essentially au courant with goings-on in his life anyway. I am in absolutely no doubt that this connection will not survive his and my mom’s lives, but I’m extremely happy for my mom to still be able to enjoy this friendship after almost seven decades; and his Christmas letters are a small but integral part of it.
Here are the two of them on the occasion of his next-to-last visit, in 2016 (the last time, in 2019, my mom was struggling back from an operation that had taken place several months earlier, so we were reduced to him spending a lot of time at her sick bed and me taking him to the opera for a production we’d intended to attend all three of us together) — as well as the closing paragraph of his 2020 Christmas letter:
We send a few cards at Christmas to selected friends and relatives, though when I was working I always hated the pressure to write and give out cards to colleagues, noting that many of the ones I received had perfunctory, impersonal or generic messages (which seemed rather pointless) so I gave up on them.
As for Christmas letters (’round robins’ we call them here) the ones we receive — fewer and fewer each year I’m relieved to say — are often just cataloguing holidays or boasting about achievements by the senders or, more likely these days, their offspring. I hate these with a vengeance, and one year we sent off a spoof version of our own which I think may have marginally reduced the number we subsequently received (though I may be kidding myself).
Anyway, what’s social media for if not to keep one updated throughout the year and not just in one splurge at the end of the year?! I must admit I’m rather a Bah-Humbug kind of person where the season is concerned…