Stack of Old Letters

Why A Christmas Letter Is The Perfect Gift

All I want for Christmas is one simple thing no amount of money can buy.

Stack of Old Letters

 

HOLIDAY 2012 | Somewhere around the first of December every year my kids ask me what I want for Christmas. This year I threw them a curve ball. I don’t need a lot of new stuff, and the few new things I might want (a Vitamix down the road, maybe) are insanely out of their price range anyway.

Inspired by a story we ran last Mother’s Day (CLICK HERE to read it), I’ve asked them for just one, free thing: a letter in their own handwriting highlighting a few of the things (personal or otherwise) that were most on their minds this past year.

Why do I want this when my kids and I email and text all the time? Because our daily electronic conversations are random, dashed-off snippets, and they will never carry long-term emotional weight or be the memory trigger a physical letter can be.

Rachel McAdams in The NotebookRecently, a friend of mine described finding letters his wife wrote to her parents before they were married about what a great catch he was. “It was flattering to read them,” he said, smiling. “I had no idea she was saying that stuff about me.”

I like the idea of my kids writing to me annually, and of saving the letters so they can discover them years from now and have a clearer picture of what they did and didn’t like way back when, and who they used to be. —xo C Rule

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