The Christmas letter

The Christmas letter is often disparaged because it's not particularly personal. What you write to a family member is the same stuff that's read by your college roommate whom you haven't seen in 30 years. However, I look forward to reading the letters that accompany the Christmas cards. In fact, I would rather read the letters than the cards...although I do like looking at the pretty pictures on the cards.

We've been exchanging letters and cards with friends and family for years. I write one for my dad and also one for Belinda every year.

When my parents lived in Roundup, MT, my mom would ask me to write their letter. To help me out, she would hand me their calendar that had various notations written on specific days. Some would say, "Dr. appt. - Billings". Others would say, "Susan visited". Or "hair appt."

Needless to say, the calendar notations didn't give me much to go one. But since I talked to my parents at least once a week, I generally knew what they had been up to and could draft up a letter and then let mom look at it and add or change some specific details so that it sounded more like her writing the letter and less like me.

I tried to do this with dad also after he moved to Mandan, ND, in 2006, but this year I just wrote a letter for him and included it in his cards. He no longer can sign his name, so I didn't see any reason in pretending that he's better than he really is. I didn't think it came out too bad. I'm pretty sure that most people knew I was writing the letter for him anyway, so no use pretending.

Dad's mailing list has changed over the years also. Eight years ago, the people who received his cards were more his age -- relatives and friends in their 80s. So there was Florence Schwab, a cousin of mom's, and Sylvia Burch, the widow of a former pastor. They both are dead now along with several others. So they've been replaced on dad's Christmas letter list by more of his grandchildren. Once a grandchild leaves their parent's home, I try to add them to the list. This year I had more empty spaces to fill, so I added Krystal, my brother Gene's youngest daughter, and also Derek, our oldest son.

I keep Grandpa's list at exactly 30 people, which is as many labels as there are one page. So there's nothing magic about the number. This year, Grandpa's card consisted of a photo of him and a holiday greeting. I never know what it will be from year to year. Sometimes I send cards.

Now Belinda's Christmas card list has more than doubled over the nearly 30 years of marriage. In 1986, she sent about 40 cards. This year, it was about 90 cards...and she still dropped a couple of her friends who had stopped sending cards.

Writing Belinda's letter was easy this year. First of all, this was a really great year. I think as you get older, the years go by faster and they seem to be a lot more enjoyable.

Our trip to Brazil was definitely an unforgettable highlight, but we had several others as well. While we were in Mandan and Scott was in Colorado over the Memorial Day weekend, he proposed to Taylor. We felt like we were right there with them. First, we knew what was going to happen because we were in on the planning. I had even mailed the package to Scott's cousin Mary in Aurora that contained the T-shirts that were central to the marriage proposal.

And thanks to Facebook, we saw the photos of the proposal about as quickly as the event happened.

There were lots of other great things that happened as well. We were excited to go back to Roundup in August for a family reunion. To make it even more fun, we rented an airplane, which allowed Scott, Taylor and Derek to join Grandpa, Belinda and me on the trip. This was our first family reunion in Roundup in four years and it's fun to see how the little kids have changed. What's not so fun is when you see (or don't see) your older relatives because they are too sick to attend or perhaps they died in between reunions.

So, this year, read the Christmas letters. Soak up every last bit of them, whether you consider it bragging or just a bland, impersonal letter. There's so much that each of us can be proud of...and for some of us, we like to share the experience in a letter to our family and friends at Christmas.

Here's to a new year, and blessings to each of you.