|
||||
| ||||
|
|
|
The Christmas Letter December 11, 2005 The Reverend Roger Fritts Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland The Reading Erma Bombeck’s Christmas letter to Martha Stewart: Dear Martha, I’m writing this on the back of an old shopping list, pay no attention to the coffee and jelly stains. I’m 20 minutes late getting my daughter up for school. I am packing a lunch with one hand, and I’m on the phone with the dog pound. Seems old Ruff needs bailing out, again. Martha Stewart’s Christmas letter to Erma Bombeck:
Hi Erma, This perfectly delightful note is being sent on paper I made myself to tell you what I have been up to. Martha, I burnt my arm on the curling iron when I was trying to make those cute curly fries, how DO they do that?
Erma, since it snowed last night, I got up early and made a sled with old barn wood and a glue gun. I hand painted it in gold leaf, got out my loom, and made a blanket in peaches and mauves. Then to make the sled complete, I cloned a white horse, from DNA that I had just sitting around in my craft room, to pull it. Martha, I still can’t find the scissors to cut out some snowflakes, tried using an old disposable razor ... trashed the tablecloth. Tried that cranberry thing, frozen cranberries mushed up after I defrosted them in the microwave.
Erma, after the sled project, it was time to start making the place mats and napkins for my 20 breakfast guests. I’m serving the old standard Stewart twelve-course breakfast, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: I didn’t have time to make the tables and chairs this morning, so I used the ones I had on hand. Before I moved the table into the dining room, I decided to add just a touch of the holidays. So I repainted the room in pinks and stenciled gold stars on the ceiling. Then, while the homemade bread was rising, I took antique candle molds and made the dishes (exactly the same shade of pink) to use for breakfast. These were made from Hungarian clay, which you can get at almost any Hungarian craft store. Oh, and Martha, don’t use Fruity Pebbles as a substitute in that Rice Krispie snowball recipe, unless you happen to like a color that nauseates!
Well, Erma, I must run. I need to finish the buttonholes on the dress I’m wearing for breakfast. I’ll get out the sled and drive this note to the post office as soon as the glue dries on the envelope I’ll be making. Hope my breakfast guests don’t stay too long, I have 40,000 cranberries to string with bay leaves before my speaking engagement at noon. It’s a good thing. Seasons greetings, Your friend, Martha Martha, the smoke alarm is going off, talk to ya later. Happy Holidays, You friend, Erma The Sermon A big part of the Christian religion is about learning to love each other. Jesus said we should love our neighbor as our self. He said we should help others as the good Samaritan did. He said we should not judge others lest we be judged. In this spirit, two thousand years later, many of us express our love for others by sending Christmas greetings in December. For about 100 years, starting in the 1850s, Christmas greetings consisted of a card with a beautiful picture and a brief note inside. But in 1938 the photocopier was invented, and by the 1960s the sale of millions of such office machines made it possible for folks to send the same Christmas letter to hundreds of friends and relatives. This new expression of love is not always experienced by the recipients as a caring communication in the spirit of Jesus. Over the years some people have come to make fun of such epistles. Consider this parody:
Dear Friends,
It is that time of year again to share with you our adventures in this journey we call life. 2005 has been another year of magic and wonder.
Lori almost 3, is quite a talker. She continues to amaze the professors at the University with her intuition in foreign languages. It was fun for her to serve as an Official Translator at the Montreal Global Warming talks. Now that she is home, she intends to spend this holiday transcribing War and Peace into Arabic and Cantonese.
Chris, now 5, is growing in leaps and bounds. Since he got his first set of building blocks he seemed quite interested in large buildings. This year he designed his first skyscraper and ground was broken in Hong Kong for the new “Little Man” Towers. It is great to have a budding architect at home as he made a new addition to the house and a wonderful gazebo for our garden.
Betsy had a very busy year. In between her work as President of the American Cancer Society and Senior Partner of Goldman Sachs, she introduced a line of children’s novels and hand made active-wear. She remains occupied with the children and has introduced them to yoga and power walking this year. We are particularly proud of Mom as a starting forward representing the United States in World Cup soccer.
Dave was immersed in his Graduate School studies, and managed to co-author a paper on Multidimensional Attribute Analysis and accept a Nobel Prize for his discoveries in Quantum Physics. Along the way Dave took three startups through their initial public offering. We are proud of his work serving on the Board of Directors of IBM, Coca-Cola, and Walt Disney. Dad was also active with the kids, teaching Lori ballet and helping to lower Chris’ handicap to 5.
We were able to squeeze a little traveling in this year. We started in Aspen, went to Belarus, the Congo, Denmark, Ethiopia, the Falklands, Greenland, Holland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Venezuela, and Zaire. Our trip sailing our new boat was a great experience for the kids. We learned to communicate with dolphins and discovered a new region of deep water volcanoes.
Sergeant, our German shepherd, learned to speak Latin. Other than that, it was a very quiet year. So from our household to yours, all the blessings of the season and may your New Year be prosperous.
P.S. We found out yesterday that we won the $150 Million Power Ball Lottery. Of course, being a modest man, the letters I send out never sound like this. Each year Leslie and I try to send out a Christmas letter. This year to make it more likely that people might find the letter interesting, I have studied the advice experts have offered on the subject of Christmas letters. What, for example is an appropriate opening sentence? One advice column says: “It is important to be humble, since everyone knows you’re doing the opposite by sending out this letter. Something pleasant and thankful, will help the reader feel the letter was written solely for her—which is a lie, but not the sort of lie that hurts for very long.” Other experts advise that an opening sentence should excite the reader and leave him or her wanting to keep reading. I could follow the lead of advertisers and say “Think this is just another boring Christmas letter? Don’t be so sure! Keep reading! You may be surprised!” But that approach is already overused. So this year I open with a sentence that suggests scandal: Dear Family and Friends,
Watching the Victoria Secret Fashion Show on TV this week caused me to question my decision to be a minister. Perhaps I should be a fashion designer. But then I thought about the fact that I have never used a sewing machine, and that at 54, no super model is likely to find me attractive, and that if a super model did want to run off with me, she would probably want to have a baby and the thought of having a baby at my age gives me a migraine. So after watching the fashion show for a few minutes, I looked at my beautiful wife, Leslie, and thought about how very lucky I am to be married to her, and I handed her the remote control. The secondary paragraphs in the Christmas letter turn to “Family Members Updates.” The Christmas letter advice columns make these points: First, each paragraph following the first should reference the previous one with a short clause. This will build a sense of continuity and tie the letter together. For example, “While Jeremy was leading the baseball squad, his older sister Tamara had her braces removed!” Second, don’t brag. Third, the experts say avoid letting your family members write their own paragraphs. Though it’s cute when a six-year-old writes like a six-year-old, it’s sad when his father does. Fourth, don’t brag. Fifth, the experts say that most friends and relatives hate to read about your family’s achievements. Instead choose one of these fine topics for discussion: embarrassments; public humiliations or travel. Sixth, don’t brag. Seventh: Don’t try to get a whole year into a page. Focus on a couple of high points. Vacations, for instance, unless you took a first class cruise around the world, which would be bragging. You can slip the best game of golf you played all year in here and sort of brag a little. For those of you who did not take a vacation, or who have no interest in hearing about someone else’s vacation, skip this paragraph. Eight, don’t brag Ninth, The experts say not to use your letter as a promotion for a home-based business, even if Mary Kay Cosmetics or Amway has changed your life. In my own case, I try to avoid my desire to aggressively promote the Unitarian Universalist Church in my letter to friends and family. Instead, I try to drop subtle hints. Tenth, an expert says: “All right, you can brag once, but follow it with something that proves you don’t think you’re better than everyone else. ‘Margaret won Nobel prizes in Medicine and Literature, but she still can’t keep her room picked up.’” Following all this advice my second paragraph this year goes this way:
Speaking of Leslie, she continues to find satisfaction in her work providing pastoral counseling. She and I took a road trip last summer through Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, walking in the Appalachian mountains and swimming in the Atlantic off Hilton Head Island. In September Leslie spent a weekend visiting friends in New England. Next I turn to the children. An advice columnist says: “Summarize your children for people who haven’t heard from you since last year. Mention their ages and grade in school so that the old college room mate who finally makes it out to your part of the country for a visit knows how many kids you have.” I write:
Last spring Loren, now 23 years old, took a semester off from his masters degree in cello performance at the University of Maryland. He teaches cello to students at our home, at the university, and at the Levine school. In April he developed tendinitis in his wrists and has taken a break from playing cello. With rest and physical therapy he is healing. This fall he has been a paid singer in the Spanish language Mass at the Catholic Cathedral near Dupont Circle.
David, now 19 years old, lived at home in the spring and attended Montgomery College. During the summer he worked at a business near our house. In the fall he returned to Frostburg State University, but he has decided that he prefers work to school. So now he is working in Bethesda.
Rachel, now 15 years old, is a sophomore at Walter Johnson High School. Last summer she spent two weeks at a camp in eastern Maryland and two weeks at a camp in North Carolina. She will be singing to President Bush at the annual “Christmas in Washington Concert” to be broadcast on TNT Wednesday, Dec. 14, at 8, 7 central time, but she still can’t keep her room picked up! As you can see after a creative start, my letter quickly becomes an average, typical Christmas letter giving a quick summery of our year, a small act of loving communication. Nevertheless, people complain about getting an impersonal Christmas letter. We all long for messages meant especially for us, scrawled in genuine handwriting. But I have so many relatives and friends, and I am so busy doing important things (like watching the Victoria Secret Fashion Show) that I don’t have time to write a personal letter to everyone. To make my letter more personal, about twenty years ago when I first got a computer, using mail-merge, I printed out individual letters. I inserting my friends and relatives names in the body of the letter the way mass mailing advertisers do. My friends and relatives loved it. As long as they did not get together and compare letters they each thought I was writing personally to them. Many of them wrote back personally to me. However, I felt guilty about the illusion I created that year and I have never again used mail-merge. Part of loving others is not tricking them. Now most years, we send out over a hundred photo copied letters, We try to omit the bragging. Still some people complain. For them, I like advice I found by a columnist in the Christian Science Monitor. She said: “Those who hate printed Christmas letters should not read them. No one is holding a gun to our heads, hissing through clenched teeth, ‘Read about little Susie’s dance recital or else!’ Instead, easily irritated recipients should release holiday stress by crushing each unread letter into a little ball and hurling it across the room.” Personally I am interested in reading about the lives of my friends and family. How is my aunt, who lost her house in a flood nearly a year ago, doing? Has my old friend in Michigan moved back in with his wife, or are they divorcing? How is my niece in Salt Lake doing with her new baby? Will she marry her boyfriend? The list of my questions can go on and on. All of us who write Christmas letters hope that others are interested in hearing about us. Christmas is often the only time I communicate with a lot of these people, but I do want to maintain the relationships. Religion is about learning to love each other, and keeping in touch is part of our loving each other. So, in the spirit of the season, may we find it in our hearts to accept graciously the well-meant attempts of those wishing to connect with us. Even if that means taking a softer, more tolerant stance on the subject of Christmas letters. They are in the end, simple acts of love. I want to share with you one last letter, a Hanukkah letter, written about two thousand years ago. Zikes! What a year. Joseph forgot to make reservations at the Bethlehem Inn (his carpentry projects aren’t the only thing made out of wood!). So they stick us in this stable full of stale hay and stinking animals and guess what? I go right into labor. I can’t believe that my OB doc said it was ok to make the trip.
Anyway, we have a new baby boy that we think is truly special. But it’s been a madhouse ever since.
First, we couldn’t agree on a name. Joe likes Emmanuel - I’m holding out for Jesus. In the middle of the argument all the animals in the stable started talking and taking sides.
Next, all these shepherds stopped by to gawk (as if the smell wasn’t bad enough). And, since this is Joseph’s hometown, the whole Jewish Mafia seemed to be dropping in.
You wouldn’t believe his weird “cousin” John. All the time he babbles about ‘logos’ and ‘kerygma’ and a whole bunch of stuff that’s just plain Greek to me.
I tell you, it felt like there were 5,000 relatives around, and me with only a few loaves and fishes to feed them.
We also seem to be attracting religious pilgrims. Ever try to fend off astrologers from Persia when you’re busy doing the laundry? At least those three camel jockeys brought gifts.
We can’t get a good night’s sleep with that stupid star shining through the cracks in the ceiling, and every store in town is sold out of swaddling. And then it seemed every time I went to feed the boy a half-dozen Renaissance painters would show up wanting to sketch the procedure. I finally sent Joe out for bottles and formula.
Well, got to go! Joseph had another one of his goofy visions so now we’re off to Egypt. This time, I make the reservations! All my love, Mary Sources “Ted Pack’s Web Site” http://www.tedpack.org/xmasnews.html “The truth about those Christmas letters” By Carolyn Armistead http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1210/p09s02-coop.html “The Non-Expert: The Family-Update Christmas Letter” by Rosecrans Baldwin http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/how_to/the_nonexpert_the_familyupdate_christmas_letter.php “The first Christmas letter” http://www.huumor.com/joke_3501 |
Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist
Church |
