It’s snowing in Pittsburgh this morning this early December 2018. I’m sitting by the fire, computer in lap, reminiscing about what I would usually be doing at this season. We’ve decided not to send a Christmas/New Year’s letter this year. We don’t get many from other people now, and many of the letters we’ve sent in recent years have come back “non-deliverable.”
“I stay in touch with my friends and family on Facebook, and my business associates on LinkedIn,” my husband tells me. It’s clear he has no attachment to the practice I have engaged in most of my adult life. The queasy sensations in my stomach when he says that tell me that I obviously am attached. That “staying in touch” through the years is important to me but I have to admit that the preferred forms it takes have definitely changed.
My parents initiated the practice of staying in touch through the U.S. Postal Service when I was growing up. Each early December Dad took a formal portrait of us 5, then 6 kids, dressed in what he called our “’Sunday-Go-to-Meetin’ outfits.” The film was taken to the neighborhood drug store, developed and the negatives sent to a company that put photos on Christmas/New Years Greeting Cards. After mother picked up the cards she wrote personal notes in her beautiful cursive handwriting on each one, addressed, stamped, and what we now call, “snail-mailed” them to far away family members and friends. A year or two ago, the daughter of a cousin mailed me a collection of these family holiday photo cards she’d found going through her recently deceased mother’s treasured belongings.
Most holiday letters I’ve received through the years have contained updates on children and grandchildren, some with handsome photos as evidence of their growing wellbeing, some with details of academic achievements, marriages and job promotions. Though the reputation of holiday letters is to list only good things, perhaps with touches of exaggeration, social media seems to have supplanted that role. Perhaps that’s a good thing but I will miss the notices of vacations, retirements, illnesses and deaths, and especially the changes to mailing addresses. Overall we’ve appreciated receiving good wishes for the coming years and the efforts made to keep us connected and in touch.
Rereading the holiday letter I wrote last year highlights the gifts built into the process of writing one. There is the opportunity to look back and reflect on the past year, counting its blessings and appreciating its challenges. If I were writing a Holiday letter this year what would I include? The book collaboration with friend, Christine Gautreaux – Stillpoint: A Self-Care Playbook for Caregivers to Find Ease, Time to Breathe and Reclaim Joy and the results -an actual book we can now hold in our hands? My husband’s foot surgery and meticulous convalescing? My return again to the role of caregiver and inept dog handler?
Would I include the experience of selling a house and purchasing another? Walking the neighborhood for a local candidate and the joy we felt when he won? The recent horrific event in our beloved Pittsburgh and steps our community is taking to heal?
Surely I would include the good fortune we never take for granted of being able once again to celebrate the holidays with all four of our faraway grandchildren and their parents. I know I would end by sending the best of wishes to readers of the letter, as I am sending to you now, for the happiest of holiday seasons and for joy and good health throughout 2019!
What would you include? Let’s stay in touch.
Sheila
Even the birds have fled the scene.
