Despite what Ann Landers and her readers thought about “Christmas letters,” we wrote our first one in 1963 when we moved from Hanover, NH to Corvallis, OR. With the then-recent development of the photocopier, the Sixties became the high period for such correspondence. (However, our first effort was made on a mimeograph machine, using green ink!) We did, however, repeatedly apologize for resorting to this method of keeping in touch with friends in the Northeast. When no one responded negatively to our annual summaries, we finally stopped apologizing.
Actually, we began with photo-Christmas cards, sent from Ithaca, New York in 1961, the year after Debbie was born. This segment of CameosAndCarousels.com begins with copies of those photo-greeting cards from 1961 through 1969 and our move to Maryland. I’m pleased I kept copies; they do show the growth of our family from Christmas to Christmas – with Deborah (1961); Kenneth (1963) and Christopher (1965).
The annual Christmas letters had a choppy beginning. They became consistent following 1980, with only one omission (1985) over the last forty years! Karen and I alternated authorship over the years. You might find it a challenge to guess who wrote which ones, since the letters purposely exclude first person, singular pronouns. In 2008, the year of our fiftieth wedding anniversary, we included photos of the family for the first and only time. In 2009, Karen wrote our letter in the form of a poem. Each year since then, I have written the prose summarizing the year and Karen has composed a poem, usually blank verse, as her contribution to our greetings.
A consecutive reading of these annual Christmas letters is boring! Especially over the entire 40-year period. Part of the problem is that, for the last two decades, each year begins with a reference to national and international problems that negatively influenced our outlook on what had transpired as well as our hopes and prayers for the following year. Christmas should be a time for celebration of the Birth of the Messiah and hope for the Second Coming, the Advent, of Christ; it should not be a time for the despair which the secular world is producing. We have tried to be positive. This, perhaps, is the true intent of Karen’s annual poem: a prayer for the future.
It is suggested the reader scan the prose of these letters to get an idea of who has joined our family over the last four decades and what they have done during the referenced year. May you find the prayer-poems to be of greater value!