The Christmas Letter is one of the oldest human traditions and the product of the innate desire to share one’s accomplishments with others, even if they don’t care about you, or the fact that your daughter is one of the better cello players in her age group.  The first recorded example of Christmas letters was back in the Cave Man Days when nobody had thought of Christmas yet but people were sitting around thinking that they needed to take a break from chasing mastodons and throwing rocks at each other to ponder the mysteries of the universe, such as why they were walking around in the freezing cold with nothing on their feet.   In those days, some cave people had more than others, so the ones with extra animal heads would leave them on other people’s doorsteps, which was a perfect way to say “we have extra stuff” without being of any help or comfort to the neighbors. 

The tradition went along like that for a while but really took shape thousands of years later when Americans stopped worrying about wolverine attacks and typhoid fever long enough to be nostalgic and decided that others in the country would be interested to know how many bushels of wheat they were able to thresh without any machinery. 

By the time I came around, the practice was commonplace and each year our mantel was flush with cards from scores of people my parents knew, or had once known, including one from an acquaintance who offers 2,000 word essays each year that include the title of every book he read in the preceding year (complete with italicized parenthetical commentary!), detailed accounts of his visits to fellow college glee club members who live in New Jersey including the size and location of the hot tub in which they sat to discuss how much fun it had been to be in the glee club, a dozen or so awkward comments about his second wife and her gardening prowess, and ultimately, some uncomfortable information about his daughters dating men who already have children.  

With such a thorough introduction to the niceties of Christmas lettering, I was thrilled to begin my tradition in 2007.  At the time I had a live-in girlfriend and figured that in this day and age that was sufficient stability to warrant updating people about my life.   My rules are that the letter must contain at least one item that makes my wife uncomfortable, two things that make my mother uncomfortable, and as few facts or serious sentences as possible.  I found my first edition Christmas letter the other day while sorting old files and noticed that I ended the letter with a not-so-subtle dig at then presidential contender John Edwards.  Unfortunately I didn’t have any notion that he was cheating on his cancer stricken wife, or lying about fathering a child with a new-age skank so my cracks about his "son of a mill worker" shtick and “two Americas” jive now seem relatively benign.

I started the Christmas card tradition for the selfish reason that I hoped my card would prompt my friends to reciprocate so that I would be able to enjoy the scores of letters that have given me so much entertainment in my youth.  Sadly, I have not reaped nearly as many letters as I have sown, either because people think my letters are stupid, or more likely, because I’m not as nice as my parents and never gave some pain in the ass guy the impression that I liked him well enough that I wanted to get a letter from him about his second-wife and how nicely she sponge painted the garage (If I believed  in reincarnation I’d think she’d been an interior decorator in a past life!) after she sold her condo and moved into his when they decided to get married.

The truth is, I’m not drawing nearly as many letters as I would like at this stage of my life, and most of the ones I get are tasteful updates from my extended family who all subscribe to the “no pictures of yourself after you have children until they get married or have children” rule and who generally avoid too many details about their son’s lacrosse exploits. 

Thankfully, my parents are still pulling serious volume at home in Vermont which means that I get to relive my youth on my first ski trip of each New Year.  There’s something magical about The Christmas Letter; something reassuring about the fact that certain people’s delusions persist from year to year, and something amazing about the fact that the people who were in the glee club with this clown 40 years ago are still inviting him in their hot tub.