I am working on my Christmas cards this weekend and really enjoyed reading the Wall Street Journal article: Dear Friends: Season’s Greetings! Can You Get Me a Job? about those family letters so many people include in their cards.

Holiday letters, those typically peppy annual updates on family doings, are bringing tidings of a lot less joy. More hard knocks are creeping in as unemployment persists and the economy bumbles along. Laid-off holiday scribes are using the letters in their job hunts. Pink slips, the lousy housing market and tales of forsaken vacations have displaced some of the glad tidings of yesteryear.

“This year could be difficult for many people who dread writing or reading about hard times,” says Janet Colbrunn, a retired elementary-school teacher who runs a Web site with tips on writing Christmas letters.

On the other hand, this season’s letters may be more tolerable than they were in the boom years, when many mailings gloated about lives of conspicuous consumption. “Most of the letters end up being sort of a brag sheet,” says Ann Burnett, director of North Dakota State University’s Women and Gender Studies and a collector of holiday letters. “Everyone is doing all these wonderful things. Johnny is an A student and Jenny is a cheerleader who has lots of friends.”

I used to struggle with what to write in my yearly cards. As a single person, I can’t fill a page with updates about my husband or children and I don’t think most people would really care to read about my work accomplishments. Since work takes up most of my time, my few leisure pursuits are not really letter worthy.

Finally I decided to research and write updates or stories about common ancestors and send that with my card. Since I come from a large family, it is fairly easy to pick a person or family group and fill up a sheet of paper (both sides) about their life. This gives me a yearly deadline to further my family research and provides my relatives with another page of our common family story.

What about you? Do you write yearly letters to send in your holiday cards? If you are receiving letters, are you noticing a change in tone as the article notes?

Similar Posts:

Share