Elizabeth and I have a tradition (if you can call something that we do maybe 75% of the time "tradition") of sending out yearly cards to friends and family. We don't call them Xmas cards because, well, they don't go out before Xmas. Oftentimes they don't go out before New Year's. I think one year they went out in June. We just call them our yearly letters.
I'm wondering how people feel about letters like these. Holiday letters seem to serve primarily as a means of maintaining a tie, however tenuous, with friends and family. If you have distant friends that you haven't seen in years, getting an annual "update" on their lives at least helps you to feel like they haven't completely faded into the backdrop of your own personal history. But on the other hand, does receiving a mostly-impersonal letter (in the sense that the letters are usually a copy of a general letter, with maybe a single personalized sentence added on) really enhance or even maintain the ties that much? Do they make the recipient feel like the sender cares about them?
I don't know the answers to these questions. I just know that, for whatever reason, it feels "right" to send out a letter to the extended set of friends and family once every year or so. And it's nice to receive the letters to. It's unfortunate, but there simply isn't enough time in the day to maintain strong ties with lots of these people, but I do want to maintain some link. The letters are at least one way to keep the link alive.
Posted by Tom Nugent at December 28, 2003 11:26 PM