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How not to write a tone-deaf holiday letter in 2020
Mentioning your zero-emissions luxury vehicle when friends have zero-admissions to their bank account is probably not the best move.
Each December, I revel in the veritable cornucopia of holiday cards: photos of fat Santa babies and reindeer-cats; impressively embossed envelopes that cost more than my station wagon; letters rife with humblebrag and sins of omission.
In 2020, though, the very notion of a holiday card is a slippery fish. This year we all had to take a bite of a giant garbage sandwich. Some of our sandwiches were double-stacked. Some came with a garbage milkshake chaser. Some of us were afraid to ask if we could get fries with that. However supersized your unhappy meal, you survived. And that — merely the fact that you survived — is worth sharing and sending glad tidings to your near and dear.
If you are in the habit of sending a mass-produced holiday newsletter, may I suggest particular attention be paid this year to tone. The 19th Edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, published before the year of the global hellscape, actually offers guidance for “holiday newsletters.”
The ghost of Ms. Post suggests keeping your letter to one page or less (she does not mention how she haunts the authors of the four-pagers, because Post the Ghost is a classy apparition). She emphasizes…
