The Glory Days, or Actually, Not

 

Apparently I’ve always had a problem. Always inflicted with opinions. Always judging something to death. Good bad better worser bestest worstest. Once, longer ago than you can remember, the rancor and peevishness came boomeranging back.

In an article for a church magazine—I still have it—my beat-up copy—I likened the reproduced year-end reports we sometimes received to mass marketing.

Of the dribble of Christmas mail we usually received, what counted most was the personal. No problem telling which from which. With junk mail, we were just names on the companies’ lists, relieved to remain faceless, hurried over, unaddressed. But bulk mail from friends, I felt neglected.

Christmastime mail, I suggested, could be rated like this:

1. Small cards, homemade or with appreciable art, with notes inside or even whole letters just for us.

2. Cards as in #1, no notes.

3. Oversize or ugly cards.

4. Form letters.

An enclosed family picture, I explained, puts messages in each category one rank higher. If the picture is just of the children it doesn’t count. And I fail to see what any group portrait—unless it’s of Mary and Joseph and the baby—has to do with Noel or Silent Night or Feliz Navidad, as in those photo cards people order.

Why, I asked, do I like small cards? They just seem less gaudy and sleazy. Christmas gets so sleazy.

Something else, too, seemed out of whack. Everybody’s extraordinary exploits. If all I had to go on were the form letters we’ve gotten, I wrote, I’d think us abnormal here at our house. We don’t seem to have “made it” year after year after year. We’re not relentlessly successful.

I added, Of course, foisting our private woes upon an unsuspecting, distant population would be inappropriate. For example—

Merry Christmas, everybody. How’ve you been?

I don’t have much news. Paulson is still a ho-hum teacher at the middle school and I just drag around the house most days. I watch TV some and empty out the mousetraps.

Jennifer (15) is getting terrible grades in most of her classes. Christopher (12) has taken to beating the dog—I don’t know why. And Zachary (7) won’t go outdoors without me along, anymore, and at bedtime he says he wants to nurse.

It’s been a pretty much regular year for us. We went to McDonald’s in Lancaster, twice, and once to the Dairy Queen in Cumberland.

We didn’t buy anything major (except another used refrigerator). Our garden was a failure, again. The place is getting more run-down and basically I’m expecting everything to get worse instead of better.

Best, I thought, to be frank.

A terrible rash of mail followed. In an early-January issue of the magazine, in a note to readers, that’s how the editor termed it—rash. Due to the volume he could print only excerpts. “None of those we’ve received to date,” he reported, “are form letters.”

(Now what does that tell you? Was he laughing, or what?)

Let me lift a few lines from his excerpts.

I don’t think this is an issue to merit space in a church periodical. E. M.

Those printed letters that come our way are far from “unfriendly,” “full of lies,” “barriers to intimacy,” or any of the other unpleasant charges. M. L.

I resent being called a liar and invite anyone who has received a form letter from me in the past decade to point out my untruths. J. H.

We don’t write our letter to brag about our year’s accomplishments. S. S.

I bless copy machines and computers for making it easier to be in touch with those we love. D. S.

We do not put our duplicated Christmas letters in the same class as junk mail, nor are we out to be tricking someone. If the readers are turned off, that is their problem, not mine. P. I.

I love Christmas mail. I read every word. R. H.

Form letters are the most desirable Christmas mail, right after a personal letter. I do not view them as an accounting of “enviable adventures and achievements” or a “sob story.” R. F.

After four weeks of this, the editor cut off publishing.

I still think what I thought then. I also have, still, the Baby-Jesus-in-the-manger card from a far-off friend, scrawled with green ink. “Do you realize,” she wrote, “how paranoid anyone will be now, sending you Christmas greetings?”

“I share your feelings,” she went on. “Especially this year. The form letters only further isolate us, escalating the loneliness that comes from thinking everyone we know has had no hard times whatsoever. Should we ever recover from the mess we’re in, I pray for sensitivity never to send inflated news to deflated people.”

Far as I can tell, those letters aren’t so much the rage anymore. But we still blow things up, don’t we.