When Christmas Letters Go Bad

'Tis the season to reach out to friends you've pretty much neglected for the other 364 days of the year and send out a card or letter (either through mail or electronically) which chronicles the past year. I've largely handed over this duty to my wife, because (1) I think she's better at writing those sorts of things than I am, as most people do not like receiving holiday greetings chock-full of tongue-in-cheek, sardonic and deadpan humor and occasional "I can't believe he wrote that"-type comments and (2) she has a much better handle on the real going-on's of the kids as the true COO of the home.

I read a recent blog entry written by a good buddy and winced at both its incisiveness and truth. In it, he references (somewhat annoying) holiday updates on the kids, reporting that "... they are pretty and well-dressed, hitting academic and social milestones way ahead of schedule. They are described as delighting in their siblings, happy and sociable, a joy to watch grow up. If there is even a peep of complaint from the parents, it is over the hecticness of having to shuttle the little ones between soccer practice, piano, and dance rehearsal." Letters like these tend to chafe readers who don't share quite as an idyllic home life.

In general, I would say that these updates, while overwhelmingly done in a loving spirit of "here's what's going on with us", can often deteriorate into thinly-veiled self-congratulatory (albeit unintentional) speech about how great our family is. Even photos of cute kids can be stinging to those who are single or couples who are having trouble getting pregnant. I distinctly remember an adult friend who sent out photo Christmas cards of himself skiing with an only half-joking retort of "why should only married couples with kids get to send these out?"

People can garnish these letters with religious verbiage, such as "God provided Tom a job offer in Alabama in which he was initially offered $100,000 more than his current salary. The partners flew us down and wined and dined us, as really wanted him because he's considered the preeminent expert in his specialty. Despite them bumping up the offer an additional $50,000, we prayed about it and we decided to stay in California because we really felt called to stay at our church. We trust that God will honor our decision to leave money on the table." or "Ellen was praying really hard about which offer she should accept - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Caltech, Duke, Yale or Stanford - but God really answered her when she won that scholarship from Stanford based on her monoclonal antibody research with NIH this summer. Harvard was very disappointed at her decision, but God may open the door for her to do her master's there." Whatever.

To be clear, I'm not saying that people should cease in this exercise. If you're going to hold off on sharing photos or news about yourself in fear of either you coming off as bragging or people feeling marginalized, envious or jealous, you'd never share, period. But perhaps what would be in order is a little sensitivity, grace and humility in terms of how and to whom things are communicated. For example, your recently laid-off friends who just had the bank foreclose on their house might not want to hear about you making partner at your law firm and how you're planning on using your bonus to buy a beach house on the North Shore because it's a "great time to buy with real estate tanking."

But above all for the writer, especially those of us who count ourselves as Christian, I would hope that writing these letters would serve as time to reflect upon God's grace in providing these blessings, and also holding on to these as reminders that God's goodness is constant regardless of circumstance. That is, God isn't simply good and gracious because Sally won her piano recital, Timmy was the most popular kid in preschool and I just got promoted at work; no, God is good and gracious all the time even if Timmy and Sally struggled and I had to go through another round of chemotherapy. There's a thin line between, "God has done this" and "We have done this" - but it makes all the difference in the world in terms of how we view ourselves, how we view others, and how we view God.

For those of you who got one, I hope you liked our Christmas letter. Otherwise, I may have inadvertently thrown my wife under the bus.