OPINION|
Ducks, windshield wipers, trams, and two-year-old wish lists. Boy, I miss the old-fashioned holiday letters.
Whatever you called them — Christmas letters, holiday letters, New Year’s letters — these letters made the season for me. I miss writing them and I miss receiving them.
There was a time back in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, before email, the Internet and social media, when phone calls were relatively expensive and regular communication was accomplished through the mail – letters, postcards, and greeting cards. The holiday letters served to maintain contact with relatives and friends with whom regular communication was sporadic, at best.
For those who wrote for a living, the holiday letter was an escape — an opportunity to be creative and tell stories in ways not possible in their “day jobs.” The funnier the stories, the better. And because people were in a better mood around the holidays, they were willing recipients to the humor.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate holiday letters that include the update about what all the family members are doing; I included that information in the letters I wrote. But it was the storytelling about even the most mundane human events that I missed writing and receiving.
We didn’t include the Christmas letter in all of the holiday cards we sent. We only included the letter to family members and others we thought would care about what we had to say.
I wrote 20 holiday letters from 1976 through 1995. Eighteen went out around Christmas; the other two were late and went out around New Year’s. They were usually the front and back of an 8½ x 11 sheet of paper, then copied, often on color paper. When I got wordy, we used 8½ x 14 paper. I enjoyed — and took advantage of — the freedom in content and style.
The first one, in 1976, referred to our rodent problem:
Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…..Finally!
In 1977, I included this about moving into our new house and the start of a lifelong friendship:
The first day we were in the house, Janet asked me “Did you hear a duck quack?” I smiled at her, got out the thermometer, and quietly located the straight jacket just in case. In just a few minutes, however, I took the thermometer from her and put it in my mouth and located the extra-large straight jacket. I heard the duck, too. It is a big, white duck named Demitrie that belongs to our neighbors three doors down.
In 1980, there was this:
You walk into a room. You’ve seen these people before….but they look different somehow. As you move through the crowd, people look at you a little puzzled. The conversation is shallow, stilted. The topics are old and worn out. You are glad you went, but you are happy it only lasted a few hours. Welcome to my 10-year high school reunion celebrated in June at the Royals Stadium Club in Kansas City.
In 1981, when I worked at Emporia State University, I included this faux pas:
Running out of gas three miles outside Emporia at 3 o’clock in the morning wasn’t funny. It was a long 4½-hour trip out to Hays, Kansas, that afternoon. And it was a longer trip back after our basketball team lost. It was about 4:30 a.m. when we got to bed. We weren’t ready to go to Wichita the next night to cover the women’s basketball team, but we did. No, we didn’t run out of gas again.
In 1985, after our daughter, Jennifer, was born in January, I included a list of 17 things they don’t teach you in childbirth class, including these three:
- Most baby photographers have beards, smoke small obnoxious Cuban cigars in small rooms, make weird noises, and scare babies to death.
- When traveling, a colicky baby’s cry can melt the windshield wipers.
- The whites of your eyes become permanently bloodshot from lack of sleep.
In 1987:
Jennifer, when asked what she liked best about going to the (then) SMSU football and basketball games: “The band, seeing Boomer the Bear, and watching the girls dance.”
Jennifer, when asked what her favorite ride was at Silver Dollar City: “The green thing,” also known as the Tram, which takes you from the parking lot to the entrance.
In 1990, when our son, Brian, was two-years-old:
When we asked Brian what he wanted for Christmas, he thought for a moment and said: “Something to eat, something to play with, and something for Mom.”
In 1992:
Brian (age 4) learned the alphabet and how to spell lots of words. Janet helped him learn how to spell his name on the computer. It worked great. There was only one thing we didn’t think of: making the transition from spelling his name using a keyboard to spelling his name out loud. So, the first time someone asked Brian to spell his name, he proudly answered: “B-R-I-A-N—space—K-I-N-C-A-I-D.”
And in 1995, I was sorry I missed this baseball memory:
I was out of town for Brian’s most exciting game. That was when the deer came across the highway, jumped the fence, raced by Janet, who was coaching first base, pranced around the baseball diamond between the players, leaped over the row of spectators sitting in lawn chairs, and disappeared into the woods. After everyone regained their composure, the play was appealed, and the deer was called out for missing both second and third base.
By 1996, our kids were pre-teens and weren’t excited about me writing funny stories about them in a holiday letter, and it was going to be hard to write a letter without including them. Plus, it took time to write the letter and there didn’t seem to be much free time at that point in our lives. So that was the end of our Christmas letter tradition. It was my decision, I know.
Still, I miss those holiday letters.
