Perspective: How and why to start a Christmas journal this year
In the classic Christmas story “Dave Cooks the Turkey,” popularized by the late Canadian humorist Stuart McLean, a husband buys a Christmas planner for his wife and lives to regret it, as the wife starts preparations for Christmas the following May.
This is funnier, I think, if you are man.
For some women in my acquaintance, Christmas is, in fact, a multiseason project, or should be, given the the sheer amount of work it takes to orchestrate a proper family celebration. When one stops Christmassing in early January, it can be hard to pick up again in late November.
Which is why a much younger me picked up a pen on Jan. 2, 1994, and composed a letter that was somewhat pompously titled “A letter to myself, upon how to improve next year’s Christmas.”
What followed was a to-do list, which could also have been called a not-done list, that was clearly born of frustrations with the way December 1993 had transpired. The letter was a two-page stream of consciousness that told my future self what she would need for the holidays next year (wrapping paper, cellophane, a spotlight for the wreath), what she’d done that had worked well (scheduling a haircut the week before Christmas), what she wished she’d done (strung white lights on the crabapple tree).
That over-the-top decorated house that everyone comes from surrounding towns to see? Go on the 26th next year, not the 23rd; too crowded.
You really don’t need four kinds of homemade cookies. Nobody eats the nutmeg logs but me.
And on it went. First-world musings, to be sure. And it wasn’t “Dave Cooks the Turkey.” It was, to my post-holiday, new-mom, sleep-deprived mind, “How to Keep Next Christmas From Going Up in Flames.” I folded the letter, put it an envelope, sealed it, and wrote my name on it and the words, “Open next Thanksgiving!”
Looking at this letter 30 years later, I’m not sure how helpful it was the next year; there is plenty in it that will be mocked by my children one day. But a year later, I wrote another one; and the next year, another; and suddenly, because time flies as fast as reindeer, I have a stash of what amounts to a generation of Christmas letters.
I would like to say that the letters reflect a growing maturity, and hard-won wisdom that accumulated year after year. In fact, what they still reflect more than anything is that I, like the wife in “Dave Cooks the Turkey,” really need to prepare for Christmas all year, because I still can’t seem to get the holiday season exactly right, even with grown kids around to help.
Let’s just say, “No more shopping on Christmas Eve!” has made the letter more than once, as has, “No ugly garlands!”
Also, I just unpacked a shoebox full of tree ornaments needing repairs that I fully intended to mend over the summer, showing that I’m not particularly good at following my own advice.
But more than the utilitarian purpose of this motley collection of letters, some of which seem to be stained with gingerbread batter, they have evolved into an informal Christmas journal, which brings back happy memories when I go through them every year. (Well, mostly happy. Honestly, I would prefer to forget the Christmas Eve that I was standing in line at CVS at 8 p.m. with an armload of stocking stuffers, and then had to go back a half-hour later because we were somehow out of diapers.)
This is because, over time, the letters grew longer, as I started to include in them the most meaningful things we had done as a family over the holiday season. And then I started to add a few highlights of the year overall, and so they began to be less of a to-do list and more of a journal. They were not like the stylized Christmas letters that I would sometimes send out in our holiday cards; there is a performative nature to those letters, as much as I enjoy receiving them from my family and friends.
These letters to myself were sometimes sloppy and raw, for example, when I suffered one of what Queen Elizabeth famously called her “annus horribilus,” or when I forgot to write the letter in January and tried to compose it in June. Also, they reveal what I consider to be many and vast personal failings, such as my mercifully short-lived obsession with having my children wear matching Christmas pajamas every year.
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As the years went on, my children showed no interest in this growing collection of letters, but other mothers did. My best friend started her own collection a few years after I did; she was devastated when she couldn’t find them last year, and fears they may have been thrown out during a home renovation. She’s starting anew this year.
Also, I’ve learned that there’s no tradition so good that it can’t be improved upon by someone else. Ten years ago, I wrote an essay about the letters that was published in Family Circle magazine. Two years ago, I received a wonderful email from a woman in California who had started the tradition herself, but with a twist: She’d bought a sturdy red notebook in which she wrote down the same sorts of things — reminders of what she would need next year, what worked and what didn’t (“Don’t order the vegetables if ordering dinner from Oliver’s — they’re not very good,” she wrote).
I was thrilled, not only that my seemingly silly tradition had been meaningful for someone else, but also that she’d found a way to make it better. She sent photos, and her coffee-table-quality journal is so much nicer than my pile of wrinkled, old envelopes, with hurried handwriting and address labels from houses we long ago departed.
I thought briefly about getting my own pretty journal and pasting the old letters in it, but, like homemade ornaments my children made in grade school, some things are glorious in their imperfection. That’s true of Christmas itself.
And so even if the running theme of “how to improve next year’s Christmas” is never fully realized — because when we solve one problem there’s always another waiting to replace it, and I am always going to make nutmeg logs in December even if nobody eats them — the letters themselves remind me that Christmas will always be messy and humble and wonderful. Just like the birth that it celebrates.
