Christmas Letter 2009: I’m a Genius, and My Kids Are Amazing

One of the real joys of the holiday season is reading the annual Christmas letters from family and friends. The best letters manage to be funny, clever, poignant, self-mocking, and most of all brutally honest — quite a trick to pull off with just a few hundred words. 

This I freely admit: My friends inspire me to write better Christmas letters. I won’t say I compete with them — if I did, I’d have to push my kids to be more interesting, and there’s no telling what dark alleys that would lead us toward. I just like to think that the people reading my letters get a kick out of them.

Unfortunately, there’s another kind of holiday letter. The worst are the chirpy ones that stop just short of offering the exact amount of the husband’s annual bonus and photocopies of the kids’ perfect SAT scores. 

We got one today … well, I can’t go into details, because it would be unfair to the very nice people who sent it to us. We like these people a lot. I’ll go as far as to say they’re instantly likable. You meet them, and you feel comfortable around them. They’re warm, friendly, and gracious.

But during a week like this, when Kimberly and I are fighting with the kids to not leave dirty socks under the Christmas tree, I really don’t need to read about how someone else’s children all make perfect grades, master technology instantly, and pick up their rooms without being told. 

You know?

I can barely get my kids to bathe this time of year, much less organize their bookshelves or defrag our computers. They’re great kids in many ways, but I’d rather go off the holiday grid than to stack our family letters with details of their finest attributes. In two sentences I could make each of our kids sound so perfect that other people would start drinking early the day the letter arrived, knowing their children can’t possibly measure up to ours.

But I’d never do it, for two good reasons: First, it would be a gross misrepresentation of who our children really are. Second, it would serve no purpose other than to make other people feel bad about their own kids. 

So how do you write a good Christmas letter? I’ve seen useful advice posted here and there. But the real key is this: Your friends and family should look forward to reading your annual letter, and when they finish, they should wish it had gone on a little longer. 

Easier said than done, I know. But if you’re going to take the time to write anything at all, you should at least put in enough effort to get it right. A Christmas letter doesn’t have to be clever or even memorable. It just needs to make its recipients happy they took the time to read it.

Is that too much to ask?

Tags: Tags: children, christmas, christmas letters, writing