Friday, December 21, 2007

Day 3 - The Christmas Letter

On the 3rd day of Christmas,
our true friends sent to us
a Christmas letter to enjoy.

This is a "grab bag" post - a topic that helps me remember Christmases past.

When I was a boy, the highlight for Christmas (well, other than the visit to Santa, the dinner at Dorothy's, and the gifts under the tree) was the box of gifts from the people in Massachusetts that I didn't know - my grandmother Seaver, my aunt Janet and uncle Ed, and my cousins Peter and Joanie. My dad always told stories about he and Ed's exploits when they were teenagers, and so I thought I knew all about them. Not really - that was 30 years before, and now they were upright citizens of Leominster.

The box came, and out tumbled the gifts - usually two each, and they weren't much in retrospect - small toys, games, and books, but it always impressed me that someone so far away would send us gifts. Of course, my parents sent a box back East also, but I didn't know that.

In many years, along with the gifts came the typewritten "letter" telling us about their year. I have several of these and have copied them for my cousins who were thrilled to receive them.

Linda and I have been sending a Christmas letter since the girls were small - probably since 1983 or so, when I had my first IBM computer. I typed it up on the computer and printed it on the dot-matrix printer - painfully slow and nearly illegible, if you recall! As the technology improved, the letter did too, and by 1990 we were printing them on pre-printed decorative letter stock, and now there are pictures. I suppose that, in an email version, I could embed videos too, if I had some.

We print and send about 120 copies of the current letter to family and friends. I try to described the highlights of the year -- the vacations, the places visited, the special activities at work, church or community, the status of the girls and something about the grandkids. Of course, genealogy plays a large part in my paragraph, and I list my web site and blogs(but I doubt that anyone visits them!). If anybody wants an email copy of this years letter, please let me know at rjseaver(at)cox.net.

This post will be part of the "Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories" carnival - organized by Thomas MacEntee at the Destination: Austin Family blog. Please go to Thomas' blog and read the submissions for each day.

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