Waiting to exhale over holiday greetings

With Christmas lurking just behind the next snowflake, I find myself waiting in breathless anticipation for The Arrival.

No, it’s not Santa’s arrival that I find my heart a-flutter for. It’s not the Star of Bethlehem or midnight madness sales or Bing Crosby film reruns. “It’s a Wonderful Life” would have been a good guess, but it’s not that either.

It’s The Arrival of The Letter that has me all goose-pimply.

See, every year about this time I find a holiday letter in the mailbox from friends I have known for many years. They live far, far away, and each year the letter tells me that their perfect life has gotten even perfecter. Each year, I fear that their life has become the perfectest it can ever be, that they will have no superlatives this year to top last year’s superlatives, and then the letters will have to stop.

But each year without fail the letter arrives. And each year I find that their perfect lives have gotten perfecter and perfecter once again.

Oh, I know some of those words are wrong. That’s why I don’t write a holiday letter. Still way too much room for improvement.

But still, it’s nice to read reports from the perfect life, isn’t it? Just so we know what we should be shooting for.

When I open their letter, I can’t help but think that I’m reading a report from Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, “where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all of the children are above average.”

To their credit, the family that sends the letter each year is an admirable collection of exceptional people. The children are beautiful, intelligent, and talented far beyond the norm, and the husband and wife are remarkable individuals, both of them at the top of their very competitive fields of enterprise.

So when I read their letter, it’s not that I think that they’re lying or exaggerating or gilding the lily of their perfection. They really do accomplish marvelous things in the course of a year.

And every year, without fail, they tell of every remarkable thing they have done in the year since they told the last time of the remarkable things they did the year before.

In detail.

In sparkling, glowing, tap-dancing detail.

And all of it, I am sure, entirely true and fact-check proof.

But once it comes and I open it, it’s about as compelling as reading another chapter of a novel without conflict, without bad guys, without fear that the hero will fail in whatever quest he decides to undertake. No, in this version of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” there’s no frozen river to jump into, and all the angels already have sparkling wings right from the start.

And when I read The Letter, I imagine what it must have been like to be on Michael Jordan’s Christmas letter list during his glory years, and to read about how many points he scored or how many rebounds he pulled down or how many championship rings he polished in the last year.

But he probably didn’t do that, did he? Because—it’s almost too obvious to mention—he didn’t have to.

No, everybody who mattered in MJ’s life was already paying attention. He didn’t need to send out his resume every holiday season to maintain his position in our hearts.

And that’s really what my friends’ eagerly awaited holiday letter reads like: a resume, listing all of their accomplishments during the previous year in hopes of… what? A promotion? A better office? A dental plan?

To be honest, I never know how to respond when the resume arrives. I already know most of what’s covered in the letter because… well, because we’re friends. I’ve been paying attention. And if I hadn’t been close enough to pay attention, their resume probably wouldn’t have mattered to me anyway.

I mean, it’s not like I said, “I’ll be accepting applications for our friendship from now through New Year’s Day. Be sure to include any awards you or your family might have won, or any way in which you’ve excelled over your less-accomplished neighbors. I’ll have my personnel department notify you as soon as I’ve made my decision.”

No. I said nothing like that. Nothing at all. So I never know quite how to respond to the letter. Once it comes, it leaves me speechless.

So here I am again, waiting for The Letter that arrives each year at this time.

And, as always, I’m just breathless in anticipation.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com

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