Ok. I Give. Who *Are* These People Sending Out Holiday Letters?

The BBQ Pit
1

Yup; got one yesterday. Chalk it up to me really questioning who’s the nutball here. And I quote:

“It is so gratifying for me to be able to write year after year and tell you of our accomplishments, especially when I know so many of you are not doing as well as we are.”

What. The. Fuck.

Especially frustrating is that this is from a somewhat distant friend and I can’t jump on the horn to do a sanity check with other recipients.

Does she really believe that’s inoffensive? Is it really inoffensive? It amazes me to no end the amount of detail I have received from she and others in this Happy Holidays! garbage. Do I need to know graphic details about the delivery? Does anyone enjoy getting this shit?

I realize that path has probably been done ad naseum, but please indulge:

Dear [everyone I can dig up from the past 30 years of my life]:

Well, I still haven’t graduated from college but hope to someday before my fortieth birthday. As some of you may remember, I procrastinate about everything and this has proved a real challenge for me turning in assignments on time. I think we can scrape together the $1600 it’s going to cost for my next semester.

The dog is doing great, we switched her to solid Science Diet and her poops are really, really firm and healthy. She vomits once in a while but it’s usually just a big clump that’s easy to pick up with paper towels.

I still am a rotten cook and our dinners usually consist of pizza or Beefaroni. Sometimes I just rinse the bowl with no soap and hang it to dry.

My brother-in-law did, in fact, show up to the wedding and it turned out that his fiance didn’t know he was planning on staying out the two nights before the nuptials. It was just one of those communication errors.

I’d love to fill you in on other family members but it’s difficult to keep my estragements straight. I think I’m speaking to my parents but am not sure about my sister until I know if she accepts my apology.

Here’s for a great holiday. Best to all,

Igloo

2

LOL, you’re a much kinder person than I, igloo.
An old college “friend” sent me what could’ve been the same letter-the “We’re doing WONDERFULLY, I am sorry to hear you aren’t”
I responded with a nice, thorough, fuck you and the horse you rode in on letter. I do believe I used the phrase “self-absorbed uppity bitch” once or twice.

I won’t even comment on what I did to the distant not-quite relative who year after year sent us a card, with all of our names spelled wrong-on computer stick ons. She couldn’t even butcher our names in her own pen.

3

An old boss of mine used to send out Christmas cards with small personalized messages to his employees, which was nice to get. I found out that for the employees who his wife had known for longer (I hadn’t been working there long), she would enclose one of these letters. It would go into rants about abortion and other similar topics - gee, what a nice holiday message! :eek:

4

You have got to be kidding me, Igloo. Send it back with a used tampon stuck to it, or a picture of animal porn you scanned off the Net, or maybe you could mutilate the picture that was sent, if there was one, or something. She’ll get the picture. Wow.

5

Some friends of mine have a friend we’ll call Joe, who was dating a girl named, we’ll say, Betty. Dating pretty heavily - engaged at one point, I think. Joe and Betty came to visit them and none of us were that impressed with her, but what the hell, she made Joe happy.

That Christmas, my friends get a Christmas letter from Betty. Now, they’d met this person once, for a couple of days, and only through Joe, but they got on the list. First time they’d had any contact with her since the visit.

They read the letter to me and it was incredible. It was this recounting of all the wonderful things Betty had done that year, and what a great person she was for doing them. However, nearly every paragraph had something to do with her falling out with a friend. Seriously, over and over the anecdotes would end with her and some friend parting ways and how said it was, but she supposed it was for the best. She lost at least four different friendships during the letter.

Add another one when I noticed that Joe - her boyfriend and fiance - wasn’t mentioned AT ALL. Not a single drop of his name. I think he noticed as well; they aren’t together anymore.

But people send these things out. Presumably they’d like getting one. Seems to me that if you have to recount your whole year to someone to catch them up, are they that close of a friend?

6

One of my sisters does the yearly letter thing as well but she’s not condescending about it. Much of it is just MPSIMS but it’s family MPSIMS and I don’t get to see her little family that often. By the time I first saw her kids both of them had started school already.

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Yes. I like to hear about what’s happenning in the lives of my friends and family. That’s because I care about them. Sure, I’ve likely talked to them at some point during the year, but as one gets older, one starts to realize that it’s remarkably easy to fall out of touch with people.

We read into things what we choose to. I assume that the people sending me letters are not trying to gloat, ridicule, or insult–and therefore, I don’t see any gloating, ridicule, or insult in their letters.

:shrug: Use the letter to start a nice cozy fire. Then move on with your life.

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To clarify: I don’t have any issue with the MPSIMS letter that just fills people in on the goings-on. But holy fuckhairs, some of the condescending crap that comes out of these letters is really mind-boggling. Abortion? In a holiday letter? Or something that could be miscontrued for a journal – excuse me, locked-diary w/barbed wire-and-savage-bloodhounds-protecing-it – entry?

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(As a clarification, Igloo, I’m not saying that your “friend” is not a complete asshole. She is.)

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UN-believable. I suppose they meant it to read like “We know we should be thankful for our good fortune” but it reads like “We’re better than you losers” which I suspect is how they really feel. They don’t realize how telling their choice of words is.

I’d send one back that said something like “It’s so gratifying to be able to write a letter that has enough class to avoid gloating, especially when it’s clear that some of you have so much trouble with this concept.”

One of my friends sends a long holiday letter each year and in it he not only gives news but also reflects on the stuff he’s done. For example, he wrote about how his trip to Belize made him change his worldview, and explained why he chose the medical residency that he did. I love his letters because they are thoughtful and interesting and his real self comes through.

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Right – Andros and Cranky (is it ok if I call you Cranky?) I totally get your point about some of them being informative and welcome. Quite frankly, I’ve definitely received musings that I thought were delightful and not at all self-congratulatory or obnoxious. I don’t think I’m a glass is half empty kinda gal and know that I don’t whip out the pessimisstic-ometor when I read this…umm…shit. It’s just that some of it is so blatantly over-the-top and inappropriate. In my eyes, anyway.

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May I suggest “Season’s Greeting” by David Sedaris (from Holiday on Ice)?

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ROFL. My experience is the opposite of yours.

When I was growing up, I had a friend named Bill. He wasn’t really a friend but was a friend of my friends. We didn’t really like each other but tolerated each other. Oh, I’ll be honest, we didn’t like each other at all.

I started getting these Christmas letters from him every year. He moved to a city far away. They were NOT ‘we are doing wonderfully’ letters but letters of pure human tragedy written in a very high spirited, positive and very religious way. You know, the “God has a plan and this is a test we all passed with flying colors and it’s all for the best my little Angie died…” attitude.

No matter how bad you thought your year was, this brought home that it wasn’t that bad. Accidents, children getting very sick and dying, unemployment, suicide in near family, etc. It was grueling getting through them.

A few years ago they stopped.

Based on previous letters, I assume they are all dead.

14

My rule of thumb is that anyone that sends me boilerplate is not my friend. If you can’t give up 20 minutes of your life to write me a letter, why should you expect I’ll give up 20 minutes of mine to read one?

15

AHH you beat me!

It’s in his short essay/story collection Holidays on Ice and is fucking hilarious! Go forth and read.

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Andymurph I was a mess just then reading your post. Your phrasing was just so damn funny, but I had inner guilt at laughing.

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I know exactly what you mean Igloo

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I think the rule of thumb when writing these letters is, “Am I telling them this because they’ll want to know it, or because I want to tell it?”

19

My rule of thumb is to not be so picky about correspondence from my friends.

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Oh, lighten up. And I mean that respectfully.

There are two issues going on:

  1. The receipt of pleasant, welcome, enlightening, informative prose during the Holiday Season, and

  2. The receipt of obnoxious, self-congratulatory, alarmingly detailed, and overall poorly written notes from hell during the Holiday Season.

I completely agree that hearing from friends is wonderful, if those friends are normal, and my intention for the thread is to bitch and whine about those who send No. 2 (no pun intended) above. No more, no less.