The Family Christmas Letter

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Content

Tell about the past year using character sketches of family members. Entertain your readers with anecdotes that show rather than describe just how brilliant and clever your family members are. Good quotes are pure gold, especially from little ones’ backseat conversations. Interview your kids to come up with great material.

Appearance

If your letter doesn’t immediately captivate your reader, the best content in the world will go straight into the trash can. Your care in the letter’s appearance shows respect for your reader.

Length

Keep it to two pages, three at the most. There’s beauty in simplicity. Don’t do like one woman who sent me her twenty-eight-page, two-sided, single-spaced recount of every single day of the entire year. Your goal is to leave your readers wishing for more, not pleading for less.

White space

This is the area on a page that is not covered by print. You have too much white space if you are conscious of big blank white spaces. If you squint your eyes and the entire page looks gray, not enough. A judicious use of white space gives your readers’ eyes a chance to rest.

Margins

This is mandatory white space. One and a half inches at the top and at least one inch at the bottom, right, and left is a good rule of thumb.

Fonts

Control yourself. Even though you have 579 choices readily available, use no more than three in the same letter. Two is better.

Punctuation

There are specific rules, from quotation mark placement to spaces between sentences. You respect your reader’s intelligence when you care enough to punctuate correctly.

Pictures

You can increase your letter’s value by including special photos. Make sure your pictures do not collide with your text. Allow for buffer space—a margin of at least 1/4-inch between the picture’s edges and where any text begins. Regarding photos and clip art, more is tacky, and less is lovely.

Write simply

When you choose between long and short words, go with the short ones. Strip every sentence, so all that remains are the cleanest components. Examine every word and keep only those that are necessary. For example, don’t say “At this point” when you can say “Now.”

Etiquette

The purpose of your family letter is to reacquaint readers with your family and to convey your wishes for their joyful holiday. Keep to these rules:

1. No press releases. This is not the right time to review your amazing career and most recent promotion.
2. No fundraising. You do have a captive audience, but curb the urge to ask for donations for your next mission trip or sponsors for your kids’ Jog-A-Thon.
3. No sales pitches. It is not cool to include an invitation to your next Tupperware party or mention that you have a wonderful business opportunity to share.

Inspiration

Could you use a little inspiration to get going? Check out the Flanders!

Proofread

It’s difficult to find your own errors (tell me about it!), and spell checkers can be unreliable. Ask a couple of people to proofread your final version.

Start now

A Family Christmas Letter that has been thrown together at the last minute usually shows it.

In conclusion …

With any luck, this supposed Christmas Letter from Martha Stewart to Erma Bombeck will get you into a  holiday letter-writing mood …

 

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