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 one of my online friends 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 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. But I’ve gotten this far, so I think I’ll save my epigraphs and get busy on this year’s letter.