Stick with short and sweet
Our Christmas letter will never be longer than the front of one 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.
It will not be two sided or multi-paged.
It may be single spaced with small margins and 10 point font though!
If we receive a Christmas letter longer than the front side of the paper, my husband will not read any further than the front side of that paper.
A good Christmas letter should hit the high points of the year, not the play by play details of our latest trip. Save the details for your next coffee date.
In our letter, each family member gets a paragraph about that person's yearly highlights and there is a paragraph for the whole family summing up our year.
Write in your own voice
It's always more fun to read something when you can "hear" the person who wrote the letter.
No one wants to read a stuffy letter, they want to get a glimpse inside the family that wrote the letter.
No one wants to read a boring letter. Keep it interesting.
And funny.
Anything is more fun when it's funny.
It's not time to brag
This is a big one!
If there is one thing people hate the most about Christmas letters it's how much people embellish their life over the past year. Most people you send your Christmas letter to know you. They know your business from Facebook, they have seen your kids in detention or been present when you unloaded about what a flop your last vacation was since your kids fought the whole time, your luggage got lost and you broke your toe while kicking your dog. Don't fool yourself by writing in your letter that Tommy is perfect and your vacation to Cabo was amazing! Be honest. As a side note, people also don't want to hear about your new car or your bonus and they definitely don't want to hear about your smart well behaved look better on paper kids.
Be real
It's o.k. to write about your recent vasectomy, or the job change that you made after you were laid off.
One of the best Christmas letters we ever received {and which subsequently sparked Mike's interest in writing a Christmas letter} included all of the nitty gritty life details.
It was real, and it was honest.
But it was funny and lighthearted too.
{names and identifying information have been changed to protect the writers identity}
Once again, we have the good fortune to be able to hope that
1999 has been as good to you and yours as it has been to us (our year hasn’t
been that sensational, we just don’t want you to think yours has been better
than ours). Y2K eve finds the Smith's of Cleveland healthy (we all have the flu) and happy (Diane’s going through
menopause, Ally and Katie are in finals, and I’m increasingly envious of Katie's college experience), and blessed by regular contact with loving family and
friends (we don’t read your letters either).
OK, the Hallmark portion of this missive (I don’t actually know what
this means, I’m just trying to sound intellectual, unfortunately coming across
as condescending and erudite—oops, there I go again), while true and genuine
(yeah, right), will now close as we move into the hard news:
Katie accepted Chad’s marriage proposal in April and dumped him in August
We feel almost as sorry for him as we do for Jamie
But don't be too real
The reason my husband could write about his vasectomy is because he doesn't take himself too seriously.
This is the exert from our 2005 Christmas letter.
In
other Mike related news, we (read “Rachel”) have nominated him to take one for
the team, in order to prevent the increasingly common occurrence of new
children finding their way into our family photos. By the time you read this, Mike will have
gone under the knife, in order to ensure that, if Rachel should squeeze yet
another child out of her tiny little frame, it will not be his.
Christmas letters aren't the time to fill people in on the bowel troubles you have or how Uncle Adam fell off the wagon or that you need surgery on your corn. Leave some of life a mystery!
1 comment
I make a postcard. Each person has two little lines (and we have four kids!) That's enough and I bet everyone who gets it, reads it. The other side has pictures from the year. Plus, postcards cost WAY less to mail and I print them 4-up on a sheet of paper.
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