Good news: but if you ask me what it is, I
know not;
It is a track of feet in the snow,
It is a lantern showing a path,
It is a door set open.
— G. K. Chesterton, from his notebooks, 1894-1897
The lines given above are the epigraph for my Feast of Stephen letter,
now two days late in the composing. This will be my Fifth Almost Annual
letter, as my party was the Twelfth Almost Annual version of that. I
sent my first one in 1999, and every year thereafter until last year,
when some kind of ennui set in and I just didn't do it.
The annual family letter is a genre one either loves or hates. Few
people are neutral. I'm a connoisseur of the form. I've made my share
of jokes about the more absurd examples, and once I got zapped by what
Rob calls the "karmic
boomerang." In 1995 I was reading one as I walked up the driveway,
making fun of how the writer referred to everyone as "our Dear" or "our
Darling" Someone ("Our Dear Sherrie Jean has become engaged to her
Darling Horatio. . ."). I slipped on a patch of ice and broke my leg in
two places. I spent that New Year's Eve in the hospital.
Someone on a list I read asked for help in "formatting" hers. She's
never sent one before and says she hasn't a clue where to start. As it
happens, she's a scholar of an obscure and difficult poet, and she
publishes frequently in academic journals. If she can write a
fifteen-page paper about feminist aesthetics or nineteenth-century
epistolary tropes, surely she can write a simple missive saying that
the kids are all right.
A letter, of the year-end family news type or otherwise, isn't anything
more than an essay. It has an introduction ("Wow! It's hard to believe
that it's time to get the old holiday pen and paper out again . . . ")
which states the theme ("and we've had an exciting year . . . "), then
a development of that theme, chronologically or by individual family
member ("Little Dougie scored 1600 on his SATs and has been admitted to
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the University of Southern North Dakota
at Hoople. . . "), and ends with a conclusion that ties everything up
("And we hope you are well and happy too!!")
I'm trying to be being funny, of course. I get very few letters that
are complete chuckle bait. Most are warm, sincere, and cherished,
coming as they do from people who care enough about me to remember me
at the winter holidays.
When I opened this file today I was going to do nothing but string
together the epigraphs I've used in my year-end letters. That's a
fall-back strategy for journalists who run out of things to say in a
season such as this. I did that myself just
two days ago.
But I've gotten this far, so I think I'll save my epigraphs and get
busy on this year's letter.
