The "annual holiday letter" is much maligned. Most people hate them. They can be boastful, or boring, or both. They can be too general, too intimate, too long, even too short, such as "I moved to France" above the signature of someone you haven't heard from in fifteen years.

I love them, even though I can be wicked in making fun of them. There's the one I got a few years ago that was in a tiny italic font and included the testimony that one of the family members gave on the occasion of his baptism by immersion. (It ended with a call to conversion for "unsaved" readers and the phone number of their church.) Another was always written in the voice of the person's dog. One year I was reading along groaning at this universally-discouraged device when suddenly my human friend's voice took over -- the dog had died at the start of the holidays, and the rest was more or less a euology for the departed pet. 

I've had my comeuppance for this ridicule. In 1995 I was reading (and mentally deriding) one of the more egregious examples (their "dear Frank" bought a Mercedes and their "darling Sheila" was going to marry her "dear Harold" who'd just become a CEO of something) when I slipped on the icy driveway and broke my leg.

Of course, none of this has stopped me from making my own contribution to the genre. I wrote my first in 1999. I waxed philosophic about the turning of the century (avoiding the question of whether or not it was actually turning then or the next year). I took care to devote as much space individually to Ron and to Lynn as I did to myself, even though I think my major motivation was to promote all the writing activities (including this on-line journal) that I was enjoying in my "retirement."

Last year the holiday season came three months after my high school reunion. I'd seen a lot of old friends and felt compelled to make contact again. I also used the opportunity to distribute my self-published memoir, Here Are Poinsettias, especially to those who had also learned Sister Rita's poinsettia song and scraped glass wax off Mrs.Smith's fourth-grade classroom windows.

A pattern has emerged to my holiday lettering. I don't send Christmas cards. I write my party invitation right after Thanksgiving and send it on the second day of Advent. During the week after my party I compose the holiday letter, date it on December 26, the Feast of Stephen, and get it in the mail around New Year's Eve. This allows me to add hand-written thank you notes to those who have gifted me with some tangible object (although the gift of a person's presence in my history remains the main reason I send them a letter).

For some reason (shyness? HA!) I did not post last year's letter, but I might take steps to correct that. I did post the one from 1999. I won't post the whole of this year's here, just the parts I want everyone I know, however casually, to read:

As usual, the seasons change too fast. 
This year’s early  balmy spell so leisurely, 
Convincing, it tricks even the cautious 
White magnolia into opening 
And giving up its petals to a sudden 
Change of air, to scatter on the ground ... 
   — Jacqueline Osherow 

My mother often told me how she learned the news about Pearl Harbor on her car radio as she drove down the hill into Tamaqua, Pennsylvania on her way to visit her sister’s new  baby. In 1999 I took that trip, tracing her route from Mahanoy City, and was surprised at  how vividly she had described what she saw that day, how she always remembered the  trees arching over her like the roof of a cathedral. 

I was seventeen and sitting in chemistry class when I learned John Kennedy had been killed, drying dishes when I saw Lee Harvey Oswald shot, but my memory of those things, though sharp, is an adolescent’s memory. I was sitting down to my breakfast after  a productive writing session on September 11 when I turned on the television and saw a plane hit a building behind another building that was already in flames. Now I know what it’s like to be an adult witnessing, however remotely, a world-shaking, world-changing event. 

I cleaned that day, not just a light dusting but a scrubbing down of walls with bucket and brush. And then I took a deep breath, reminded myself that none of us knows the hour and the moment when it might be too late to retell a memory, to offer new thanks for an old gift, to speak our love. This letter goes to more than a hundred people, some I see all the time, some I haven’t seen in years, some I’ve had only casual contact with. Know that if you are reading this, you and the circumstances that put you on this list have been held in mind today. And don’t be surprised if it’s less than a year before you hear from me again. 

Poet Rainer Maria Rilke tells us that 

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up ... 
And tonight the heavy earth is falling 
away from all other stars in the loneliness. 

We’re all falling ... 
And yet there is Someone whose hands, 
infinitely calm, hold up all this falling. 
 
 May you fall into the new year with joy and with hope, and with all that you love and believe in to hold you up.