Dear Extremely Close Personal Friend:
It’s the time of year when the holiday decorations and Visa bills go up, along with the desire to communicate with those of us you have ignored all year. But before you contemplate including my name on your list, let me plaintively offer a caveat should you choose to send me a seasonal greeting. There are two atrocities against gentility that I find intolerable.
The first is a photocopied letter feigning intimacy. Each year at this time, my husband Walter and I get a dozen or so computer-generated printouts from “close friends” who choose to inform us about their busy lives. One friend deemed it appropriate to announce in a mass mailing that he was leaving the priesthood and getting married. Another unveiled her messy divorce and proceeded to explain why her ex-husband was such a miserable companion all those years.
Still other people use this remarkably crude forum to describe surgeries, disasters, blessed events, sudden unemployment, untimely death and loneliness. I can relate to the theory of a time crunch. I am a walking-sometimes waddling-example of holiday stress. With work, two small boys, and a third due soon, I’ll be lucky if I can sign all our names to the cards I will send out in December, much less accomplish every other emergency project I have manufactured for myself-and sleep five hours a night.
But the impersonal medium of photocopied greetings is all wrong for this kind of gentle reporting. Just as Joan Rivers was pronounced too “hot” for the cool waves of television, personal sagas are too hot to be typewritten and photocopied in time to beat the Christmas rush. It embarrasses me to read about a laparoscopy or prostate operation knowing the sender made 75 photocopies of the same sentence.
Maybe I am reading too much into the popular practice of mass-produced, printout greetings, but I think a certain arrogance accompanies each mailing. I throw these letters away. The pictures of the kids I keep. The dissertations I don’t appreciate.
Which brings me to Number Two on my list of holiday horrors, Extremely Close Personal Friend. At all costs, please spare me the one punctuation which I find personally offensive. Keep your exclamation points to yourself. I receive correspondence often from someone who is enraptured with this unnecessarily emphatic ending to an otherwise enjoyable sentence. (This person is also an underliner!) One greeting card contained seven exclamation points and were it not for lack of space, I’m sure it would have contained at least seven more.
I understand there is a need for them now and again, as in “Help!” or “I had triplets!” but to haphazardly and religiously include them in letters to acquaintances accompanied by mundane news is akin to screaming “Fire!” every time you want to get a good seat in a movie theater.
I am not allergic to enthusiasm. I just believe that an exclamation point for every thought conveyed diminishes the importance of such truly monumental information as, “I poisoned my husband!” or “We’re out of debt!”
So, please, Extremely Close Personal Friend, spare me these two holiday grinch-makers. If you don’t have time to explain how you are, jot down that you’ll call sometime in June. Better yet, I’ll call you. And if you feel compelled to end every breath with an exclamation point, save mine for the envelope. You can end my name, street address, even zip code with your favorite punctuation. I’m sure the postal carrier will love them.
In the meantime, I’ll be sending you a card with lots of good wishes. And I’ll personally sign all our names. Period.
