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…

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

Each year, we give our local trash collectors a Christmas card with a small gift inside, usually $10. This year, because the guys have been exceptionally nice to our dog — throwing him doggie treats whenever he’s outside when they arrive — we decided to bump it up to $20.

So imagine my surprise when I woke up Monday morning, looked out the window, and saw that the card I’d carefully taped to the garbage-can lid was missing.

At first I thought it had blown off during the night — high winds combined with frigid temperatures would probably be enough to defeat the clear packing tape I’d used.

This year’s card was in a white envelope, which would be hard to find on our snow-covered lawn. So I recruited my wife, her brother (who’s in from Albuquerque for the holidays), and the three kids to search for…

Tags: Tags: christmas, crime, society

I’ve spent big parts of my life alternately making bad decisions, and then recovering from the damage caused by those bad decisions, which is why I enjoyed reading this brief interview in today’s New York Times Magazine.

The upshot: Our brains make decisions in the prefrontal cortex, which is bigger in humans than in other animals. It’s also the last part of the brain to develop, which is why we don’t want children making important decisions, for themselves or for others.

If you read my post last week about the Christmas-tree fiasco, you know how it worked out the last time I ignored my adult brain and listened to someone with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. That decision was actually worse than I described, thanks to a few minor and entirely self-inflicted calamities.

In the comments, I left the subject on an upbeat note: We’d gotten…

Tags: Tags: christmas, family, personal

When we lived in Los Angeles, my wife and I put up an artificial tree each year. But each year, like a bad houseguest, the tree gathered more dust, shed more needles, and sucked more joy out of the air. That’s why, when we moved here to Pennsylvania, we left the disassembled fake tree in the basement and went with a real live Christmas tree each December. (And, of course, by “live” I mean a tree we killed.)

Until this year. We woke up Saturday morning, went through the usual panic of getting kids to karate and Girl Scouts and who knows what else — I really only pay attention if I have to drive the kid there myself — and realized, halfway through the day, that we needed to get a Christmas tree. Now. Every other weekend day is booked solid for the rest of…

Tags: Tags: christmas, family, personal