This marks my first Christmas as a woman “in my 30s.”
As such, I feel it is time to behave as responsible adults do and send Christmas cards and letters to friends and family members.
I have never participated in the tradition before, but I have read enough holiday correspondence to have a pretty good idea of how to approach it.
First and foremost is the Christmas card featuring the sender and his/her spouse wearing festive sweaters in front of a fireplace.
But what to do if you don’t have a spouse?
Simply search on the Internet for a photograph of the celebrity whose name you scribbled all over your notebook during a meeting last week in ninth-grade study hall and use Photoshop to turn your pathetic delusion–in which a man who only dates Victoria’s Secret super models chooses to marry you and happily don a Santa hat for the annual Christmas photo because it is important to you–into a cheery holiday tableau.
Now that the card is taken care of, there is the matter of the Christmas letter, which follows:
Season’s Greetings!!!
You are supposed to use exclamation points in Christmas letters. Lots and lots of exclamation points. Even if an exclamation point seems inappropriate for the sentence, you should use it, e.g. “Bill’s sister lost her job for the third time in as many years! She has now been unemployed for eight months and any day now will probably guilt us into letting her live in our basement and eat our food at no cost!”
It is so hard to believe another year has come and gone!
There is only one acceptable way to begin a Christmas letter: by expressing disbelief that another year has passed. No matter that last year you seemed equally shocked that in the course of a mere 12 months, a whole year came and went. Each year you will continue to be confounded by the passing of time.
Jill’s 2010 was certainly a busy and happy one!
You must refer to yourself in the third person in Christmas letters, Bob Dole-style. Of course, this begs the question: Who wrote your Christmas letter if it wasn’t any of the people mentioned in it? Like the matter of how Santa could possibly make it to all the houses around the world in just one evening, this is a mystery of the holiday season that we simply accept.
McKenzie and Coleton continue to be cuter, smarter, more athletic, musically-gifted and bound for greatness than your children.
This is usually the subtext of discussions about your offspring in Christmas letters, but why not just be direct? If, like me, you do not have children, just make some up. They’re still superior to your readers’.
Jill enjoyed a fabulous trip to London in October with Susan, Bill and Caroline!
This takes care of two Christmas letter requirements: talking about where you went on vacation, and mentioning people whom the reader doesn’t know. Who are Susan, Bill and Caroline? Co-workers? Cousins? Members of Jill’s Civil War Re-enactment Club? You’ll never know.
Leo’s vasectomy in March went well! After some very uncomfortable swelling for a few days, he was back to normal and playing Texas Hold ‘Em every night!
Again, here two Christmas letter requirements are fulfilled in just one sentence: (1) providing too much information regarding a very personal medical procedure, and (2) ever so subtly and passively-aggressively letting your readers know that your husband is a worthless lout who would rather get drunk and play poker with his buddies than spend time with his children, which is, in fact, the reason he selfishly got a vasectomy.
Hoping 2010 was as blessed for you as it was for us.
Translation: Seeing as how I haven’t received a Christmas letter from you SINCE THE ’90s, dear reader, I have no idea if this year was blessed or miserable or if you finally found out your wife was cheating on you (because we’ve known for years).
Love,
(In case the letter wasn’t irritating enough, I thought I’d dot my “i” with a heart.)
Tags: Christmas humor, Christmas letters
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