Coprolite Newsletter, December 2004

Christmas letters have pretty much come full circle in the last forty five years or so. At first, they made me want to write a parody of them, and now unfortunately many seem like a parody themselves.

It was in the late 50s or early 60s when some of our friends and relatives first started sending out form letters at Christmas time. I’m afraid that most of them rather turned me off. At that stage in life, my contemporaries were inclined to brag a bit. Their Christmas letters breathlessly told about their latest promotions at work, the achievements of their precocious children, and the spectacular vacation trips they had taken.

Along about then, my friend Wally visited us from Florida, where he had just started practicing as a doctor after enduring years as an impoverished medical student and intern. We got to laughing at the excesses of these new-fangled brag sheets people were sending out. We even planned to send out parody letters the next year. Instead of extolling our wonderful achievements during the year, we would lament all our failures and problems. Can’t hold a job. Kids were expelled from school. Our marriage counseling isn’t going well. Woe is us. It seemed like a funny idea at the time.

Imagine my surprise when the next year we got a Christmas letter from Wally and his family. It wasn’t a sendup of the genre at all. In fact, he and his wife bought into the whole bragging thing. The new doctor was a huge success. His wife was a leader of the community. His kids took home every prize there was to win. I kept looking for the punch line, but it was all for real.

Maybe Wally’s selling out was the reason I never got around to sending out my funny take-off on Christmas letters. Nah, it was probably just my natural gift for procrastination. Anyway, we contented ourselves with sending photo greeting cards each year showing our ever-growing family.

Eventually, after many of our family, friends, and neighbors had moved away, we started including Christmas letters with our greeting cards just to let people know what was happening here at home. I tried to keep the bragging subtle and restrained, but I’m not sure how well I succeeded at that.

Now that I’ve hit the proverbial three score and ten years, the letters we receive tucked into Christmas cards have a decidedly different tone. In fact, the other day my youngest son was amazed to read the messages in our Christmas-card box. Many of them are recitals of the aches and pains, operations and diagnoses, that make up the year’s highlights for so many of my contemporaries today. "This sounds like a parody of a Christmas letter!" he exclaimed after finishing an especially sad account detailing one medical crisis after another.

His comment reminded me that at one time I was going to write just such a parody--only these people were serious.

At first, I wondered why anyone would send out such a depressing holiday greeting. But the writer of that especially sad letter expressed her reasons very well. "Didn’t want to send off all this bad news," she wrote, "but we felt you would want to know. We are looking forward to next year; it is bound to be a better one than this."

And when it comes down to it, that’s what Christmas letters are about. Sharing your life with people you care about but don’t see very often. Expressing hope for the coming year.

Still, I’m inclined to think that I should continue to leave out negative details from our own Christmas letters. There’s a good scientific reason.

They say that when energy from the Big Bang first began to congeal, half of it should have turned into matter and half into anti-matter. These positive and negative forms of matter annihilate one another whenever they bump together. This means that today there really shouldn’t be anything left of either one. And yet, somehow there was enough matter left over to make up all the mass we see in the universe today. I figure this means nature is inclined to favor the positive over the negative. If it applies to the physical world, why not the mental world as well? "Accentuate the positive" is not just a pleasant motto. It may be what keeps us in existence, just like all those galaxies.

To keep in tune with the universe, I guess that in all our future Christmas letters I should try to emulate the ones we got in the old days instead of the ones we are getting today.

So let me just wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. And by the way, wait till you hear the latest about our eleven fantastic grandchildren...

––Wayne Adams
wayne@coprolites.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

To read other Coprolite Columns, return to Newsletter Archives.

You are welcome to forward this newsletter to anyone, as long as you send it in its entirety. To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://three.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coprolitenews.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Who are the Coprolites—a tribe, a secret society, a religious order? If you ’re unfamiliar with this proud but little-understood group, visit http://www.coprolites.org for more information. Find out how you—or that friend of yours who has a birthday coming up—can benefit.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

For professionally written and edited newsletters, brochures, speeches, scripts, or web copy, get in touch with WordMagic Communications. We have lots of powerful words in stock, with fresh supplies arriving daily.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Need a speaker for your workshop, seminar, or meeting? Check out The Expert Speakers Group. .
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -