I’m a troglodyte, I admit it. I like writing letters. As I write, the person to whom I’m writing appears in
my mind’s eye. He or she looks interested, even pleased to hear from me. The recipient of my letter
chuckles appreciatively at my bon mots. It is one way of visiting with that distant person—and I get to do
all the talking.

I have little or no factual evidence that my correspondents enjoy my letters. Most do not write back. In
our age of email and cell phones, no person under 60 is going to write a letter unless it’s required by
law. Why do I persist with so little encouragement? One time a former husband corrected all my
punctuation errors in my Christmas letter and sent it back. I wasn’t offended; in fact, I was glad to learn
more about the subtleties of punctuation.

Weekly I write letters to my children, less often to distant friends, only rarely to friends in town, but
sometimes only a note written by hand will do. Most of all, I love writing my annual Christmas letter. The
Christmas letters I receive describe productive lives, cheerful family scenes, grateful sufferers, thoughtful
activists—just like my letter to them. An exception one year was a letter from my cousin, wife of a retired
army Lt. Colonel. She had four short paragraphs on one page, listing the salient events in their past year.
I imagined her standing at attention while she wrote it.

In my Christmas letter, I work hard to create an image of a philosophical woman who is also a mother
and grandmother, a sort of Sally Sartre. She is a woman who loves having her adult children come for a
visit, but also recognizes the fact that their lives are elsewhere. What Margaret Drabble said recently
about her own life at seventy struck me: “My being the center has ceased to be of importance.” I’m not
quite there yet. In my letters I am the center. My letters often start with a pithy quotation at the top.
I’ve used quotations from Samuel Johnson, Emily Dickinson, Gandhi and others of equal weight to
introduce my letter. That puts the reader on notice that we are going to have some worthwhile reading
ahead.

I observe that in writing an email, the same persona is not created. Gone is Sally Sartre, and in her place,
Lois Lane on assignment. My sentences are short, clipped, to the point. Often I omit the subject of the
sentence. My delivery is staccato. I believe I have to write fast to keep up with the speed of transmission
of email from my computer to theirs. Emails do not encourage me to expand my ideas, to step back and
look at the implications of what I’m saying. They don’t encourage me to linger with the other person—I’m
just “popping in” then rushing back out again. In my mind’s eye I see the other person is not delighted to
hear from me; in fact, she is slightly annoyed. “Oh dear, here she is again. What does she want now?”

Thus, I love writing letters, particularly my Christmas letter. Stepping back from the year and from my
life, I use the letter as a benchmark to measure where I am at this time, in this place, at this age. As I
write, I compare this year’s letter to previous ones: What books do I mention reading? What new
attitudes can be discerned? Is the tone more buoyant this year than last? What themes remain the same?
Is my persona consistent all these years? I see that I am adding brush strokes to an ongoing selfportrait.

It would be fun to gather all my Christmas letters from the last twenty years. Read them to see who she
is and was, this writer.