Holiday News
Howdy and Happy Holidays, people that I haven’t been in touch with but really really wanted to give an update on my life to…
I haven’t received one of these wonderful holiday letters in a very long time. I wonder if that’s because I secretly mock them? Way back in 1987, I wrote such a letter that included four possible scenarios of how I was doing. Had my year been a yuppie’s dream, all carefully planned and organized? Was I the new owner and operator of a muffler repair shop, breeding pitbulls? Was I working on a dissertation on Latvian hankerchief borders, or had I succumbed to a stereotypical paradigm of male domination and patriarchy by taking up with a professor?
None of the above, although elements of each scenario were true, and re-reading it a few years ago made me cringe a little. Because I think I came across a dissertation title that was similar to my joke and very very real. (Graduate students take themselves way too seriously, but then again, graduate school is far too serious by design.)
Sometimes being creative can ferret out some secret wishes. This would be the benefit for the writer. To line up the events and see if there’s a pattern, or a satisfying display of goals and achievement.
But now I wonder what the point of a year-end wrap-up would be for the audience of acquaintances. It cannot be that we want our life events to amuse and provide mockery fodder for these people. Do life events need to have some greater significance, other than “this happened to me!” for an audience to care?
When I think back to those years of teaching the first-year composition course where we asked students for a Personal Essay about a significant event, person or thing, I know that indeed not everything that happens to us is interesting. Not even those things that are common to living the way we do. Car accidents, first dates, good grades, job changes. Even the big events - weddings, funerals, babies - can become pedestrian.
What motivates someone to write that letter? Where do we go from “happy holidays” to “here’s all the stuff that happened since last January”? I have no answers, but the more I think about this, the more I wonder.