Wednesday, December 5, 2012

The Legend of The Christmas Letter


One of my favorite things to do this time of year is my Holiday letter. I love it, too, when people email me after receiving the letter to tell me how much they enjoy my humor. I think it’s great to go to an extended family event and be complimented on my humble little letter. It’s so fantastic. I’ve even had people ask me if they could be on my Christmas card list! But, I suppose I must come forward and tell you that I can’t really take sole credit. I mean I do have a small staff of tiny men and women working for me. Sure, I have the ideas, but they are the ones who put it altogether. It used to be that I would creep into houses via chimney or, even better, mail slot, but that’s when I was a lot slimmer and younger and without so much facial hair. Anyway now I am just too darn busy to be hand delivering mail. And the demand is so much greater. Now I have my little friends, the elves do it.  It used to be that my letters only traveled a short distance, but now I’m expected to get these things out and about all over the globe. Germany? Africa? Missouri? How am I supposed to get it all done and be back in time for Christmas morning?! I mean sure, I have a few feral reindeer in my neighborhood who could probably be bribed into pulling me around, but reindeer just don’t have the same work ethic that they used to. They’d probably charge me an inordinate amount of money, have me put it in Dasher’s paypal account and then ditch me anyway.  Now that marijuana’s legal in Washington I’d be hard pressed to find a couple of reindeer who weren’t clad in tie-dye ponchos, sitting on the couch making paper snowflakes and eating Cheetos, anyway.

Each year I look forward to writing the letter and each year parts of the letter wind up on the cutting room floor. I wish I did these letters on a typewriter because I’d love the drama of pulling out a piece of freshly typed Allen history, crumbling it into a ball and watching it pile up. That would be more satisfying than this backspace, delete thing I have going on. Where’s the pleasure in that? 

This year, I found it especially difficult to write the letter. To me, the letter is all about entertainment. Oh and I suppose it’s necessary to include some information about the family. I want to keep people interested and I want to avoid the possibility that someone might just skim the letter. Give them one or two boring lines and the next thing you know they are skipping whole paragraphs just to get to the end.  This year, I actually did five drafts before I finally came up with a winner. I made the mistake of not immediately printing 155 copies and now I am rethinking the letter again. In fact I was originally going to post all of the false starts here in this blog, but now that I am re-reading them, I might just weave them in to the letter. Don’t tell Mike or the kids I’m thinking of another re-write. That might be all the ammunition they need to take my laptop away and lock it up until next year.

I complained on Facebook about this whole process and people started advising me. People told me not to sweat it.  There were suggestions to let my kids do it. They told me this whole thing was no big deal. I was totally offended. Clearly these people didn’t recognize my writing prowess from years past. These are probably the people who set the letter aside to read later (sarcastic air quotes*) and never do. Or, more likely, they were Facebook novices and didn’t realize the whole point of Facebook was to complain and ask for advice and then get indignant when people actually tried to help you.

Every year as I am beginning this process I re-read the letters from years past. My favorite might be from 2006 when we first moved here and I was on the hunt for decent pizza. Pizza jokes go a long way my friends, a long way. As do toilet training jokes (see 2005), and the inevitable rain jokes-hey it is the Pacific Northwest.

I’m not sure how this year’s letter will compare to the letters of years past. I hope people enjoy it, even if it’s not my best. I will probably leave it out for the elves to put some finishing touches on it tonight. And if it still isn’t up to par by morning the reindeer can always make paper snowflakes out of it.  

 

*Yes, I realize I could have used real quotation marks here, but I really wanted you to be clear that sarcastic air quotes were indeed necessary

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