Existential angst: The annual holiday letter

[pegkerr]

I bought our photo holiday cards in October, actually, since they are cheaper then, but I never get around to starting to think about the holiday letter and sending them out until November. If you want to bitch and whine about the unspeakable tackiness of including a mass-produced holiday letter with holiday cards, shut up. I don't care what Miss Manners says (well, I usually do, but not on this point). I like receiving holiday letters from my far-flung family and friends, to learn what they have been doing in the past year. I don't care if they boast a bit. Why not tell people what is going on in your life? And why is it such a terrible thing to tell them by using the same words with different correspondents? I get a holiday card every year from a man I loved desperately when I was in college. Just a card with a signature--never a letter. It's maddening, not because I want to revive our relationship in any way--I don't--but simply because I would love to know what his year has been like.

I write the holiday letter, usually. A couple times, Rob has done a first draft, in years when I was too distracted by other things, but generally, it is accepted that writing the holiday letter is a Peg job. This year, I contemplate the task with very mixed feelings.

I realize that I am very troubled by the fact that I have nothing to report about myself. I am not writing (not writing fiction, I mean, and if you want to read my navel-gazing over this issue, here is the entry). If you have been reading my journal for awhile, you know that I have agonized about this at length, but in the past year, I seem to have let go a little (well, not entirely--my profile page still says that I am working on the ice palace book when in fact I haven't touched it for over a year. I should be honest and take that reference down, but for some reason, I haven't quite been able to bring myself to do it.) To my great grief, I have not been doing anything to progress in karate (not for lack of trying, dammit.). I look over the past year, and I have to admit (and it's a bitter admission) that I have accomplished nothing. Yeah, yeah, I have been a mother and I've kept the home fires burning, and the bills paid and I've bullied family into cleaning up after themselves. But that doesn't fill a burning need I've always felt the pull of, that my life should have some purpose. For years, I thought that purpose was writing fiction. In the past couple of years, I have been slowly letting go of that understanding of myself, and yet I don't have anything to replace it. Right now, when I am looking back over the past year, contemplating writing my letter and thinking, "What have I accomplished?" that central unanswered question haunts me.

What have I accomplished in the past year, really? The biggest thing I can think of is that I am facing the month of November without feeling suicidally depressed--mostly I think because I have been carefully exercising each day out in the sunlight. Do you have any idea what a fucking accomplishment that is, compared to the past three or four years? (And for that to be my biggest accomplishment is--paradoxically--awfully depressing).

I've written some pretty good holiday letters over the years, if I do say so myself. One of my best I wrote when the girls were very young, we were desperate for money, and things looked dreadfully grim for Rob and me. And yet--while being utterly truthful--I managed to write a holiday letter that was sweet and touching and nothing that Miss Manners would have sneered at all.

I don't know what to do with the letter this year.

Comments

[satakieli.livejournal.com]

Perhaps instead of writing your section about what you did this year, you could write about what you thought? That's what I tend to do when editing my portion of our annual family insult to Miss Manners, especially when my soundbite activities of the year are too similar to the previous years. Probably more interesting to read, too.

A few years ago, my biggest accomplishment was similar to what you've mentioned. I was ridiculously proud of myself, but far from being an accomplishment that one puts in a holiday letter, it's an accomplishment that one doesn't breathe to anyone. I suppose it's a bit sad that I usually received the biggest accolades for my easiest successes. Probably true for everybody.