This time of year, Miss Manners likes to take a casual swat at Christmas newsletters.
It’s sort of a tradition in the etiquette business. We think of it as our little winter break after a rigorous year spent urging people to keep in touch with their families and friends.
Also, it’s an easy target. Letters from people one doesn’t cherish can always be made to sound ridiculous, as young people used to find out when (back in the days before voice mail) they showed off their love letters to their little sisters. Personal letters are intended to be read only by those who begin with an affectionate interest in the writers.
This is exactly the point seized on by those who complain about Christmas newsletters.
“Who are these people?” they demand. “What makes them think I care that the mother’s got a new job, the father’s joined Promise Keepers and the daughter got her braces off? I never even knew that the mother lost her last job, the father broke his promises and the daughter had an overbite. Unless that was in the junk I threw away last year.”
The writers of such letters are not good at defending them. “I have lots of friends I never have time to get in touch with,” they generally argue. “This is my only way of letting them know what’s going on in my life.”
Miss Manners finds this a curious definition of friends: people for whom one no longer has time. She also thinks it mighty optimistic to believe that people one has left behind as life moves on would retain a fond interest in one’s welfare. It seems to her that friends and relatives ought to be told important news in what we now call real time, and that those who could easily wait until the end of the year would probably be satisfied to wait indefinitely.
And although she agrees that something more is needed to greet acquaintances than a mere signature on a card, she is not sure it is a recital of one’s own achievements or woes. Surely a line directed to the other person — “Are you going to the reunion?” “Isn’t that your son who won the lottery?” — would be better.
However, after last year’s swatting, Miss Manners received some eloquent defenses of Christmas letters:
– “Many of us have lived many different places in our lives and have many circles of friends with whom it is difficult to keep up. The `form’ letters can provide a factual basis that makes continuing the friendship easier.”
– “Yes, there are some bad and boring and even tasteless ways to send Christmas greetings, but there are also good newsletters and good reasons for sending them. Some letters that we receive are more interesting than others, but all give us a glimpse into the lives of these people who mean something to us. And many are very creative.”
– “I wish I had saved all the letters I had gotten each year, filed under their name, so now I could go back and remember the highlights, and low points of their lives.”
With the computer, bless its heart, it is possible to drop unsuitable paragraphs in an instant, so that no bragging or complaining goes out except to sympathetic intimates, for example, and travel stories are sent only to those who have demonstrated an interest. It is even possible to add a relevant line for each person to a basic a mass newsletter.
All Miss Manners asks is that Christmas not be the occasion when letter writers are encouraged to think only of themselves and not of whether they can please–or at least not exasperate–others.
