Critical reviews

Rick wasn’t crazy about our Christmas poem this year.

It was bound to happen. Every December since 1992, which was the year we got married, I’ve cranked out a Christmas newsletter comprising about eight to twelve stanzas of rhyming pentameter, covering the events of the past year for us.

Initially, it was a lark, just something I thought would be fun for our first Christmas together. And there was plenty to tell that year: our wedding, the arrival of our first niece, our honeymoon in Venezuela, a trip to Colorado, a new job for Rick. And somehow I was able to make all of it rhyme.

Some years it was more difficult than others, but every year I managed to come up with something. This year, too, though I had to confess in the course of the poem that it hadn’t been a particularly eventful year – but that sometimes an uneventful year suits us just fine. The kids are well-established in school, happy and doing well academically; Rick and I both have plenty of work and plenty to do in our downtime. No safaris, cruises or mountain treks to describe; no major life changes to touch upon. And that’s fine with us.

Still, Rick didn’t think it was a very good poem, when it was done. But I didn’t really mind. After nearly 25 years as a professional writer under one guise or another, I’m pretty thick-skinned. Not everything I write resonates with everyone. Most of the editors I currently work with tend to offer very little criticism of my work, but I don’t necessarily see that as an altogether good thing, knowing it’s mostly because we’ve worked together long enough that I know just what they like.

And criticism can come from various places: not just editors and not just bosses. Last year a local realtor asked me to write a marketing piece for her, describing a historic property that was up for sale. I worked on it for days, and the realtor was delighted with the results, but one of my closest friends visited the property during the open house and said afterwards, not knowing I’d written the marketing materials, “The house is wonderful, but the brochure didn’t do it justice at all.”

I couldn’t really understand why she didn’t like it, and I don’t really know why Rick wasn’t too fond of this year’s Christmas poem. But in a paradoxical way, sometimes this kind of criticism makes me happy, because it reminds me that I’ve reached a point in my life and in my writing career when I understand that not everyone will like everything – and that one off-the-mark piece doesn’t make me an incompetent writer. It’s subjective, and I don’t take it to heart when someone doesn’t like something I’ve written.

On the other hand, it’s always useful to listen to people’s criticism and learn from it. I don’t have to impress or please every reader with every piece of writing, but I’d rather write marketing copy that my friends find appealing, and I’d rather write a Christmas poem that Rick considers an engaging reflection of our year.

So being thick-skinned is good in my profession, but been attuned to feedback is as well. I’ve learned a lot from pieces I’ve written that have been well-received, but I’ve probably learned more from those that haven’t. I put effort into everything I write. And sometimes it’s invaluable to learn, through negative feedback, how that same amount of effort might have been better used. And how I might be able to do better next time.

Seventy-five percent to Christmas

I’m about seventy-five percent ready for Christmas.

I’ve done about seventy-five percent of my Christmas shopping, but my Santa role requires me to take one or two more trips to the nearest retail hub.

I’m about seventy-five percent done with our Christmas cards, too: the newsletter-poem has been drafted and designed, and about one-third of those we’ll send out have been printed, but we need to make a Staples run for another printer cartridge and then print all the envelopes as well before they’re done.

My Christmas cooking and baking feels about seventy-five percent done. I’ve made truffles, toffee, peanut butter squares and peppermint bark for the candy assortments we make up for friends, neighbors and teachers, but I still have to make a peppermint cake for Rick’s office potluck later this week, and I need to make a couple of desserts for Christmas Eve as well.

The house itself seems about seventy-five percent to where I’d like it to be when Christmas Day arrives. It’s generally clean and tidy, but Holly’s room is still a disaster zone, and I definitely want to have it tidied up by Christmas. Not to her standards; to mine, which means I’ll be doing the tidying more or less on my own. Plus there’s one laundry basket of clean sheets and towels yet to fold.

Christmas is six days away. That last twenty-five percent niggles a little bit, but I’ll get there. It’s not such a bad position to be in right now. Christmas is, after all, only as complicated as you make it. The idea that we need to include four kinds of homemade candy rather than two or three, or that Holly’s room must be neat when Christmas morning dawns, or even what should be included in the kids’ stockings, is an idea entirely of my own construct, I realize.

What does it really take to celebrate Christmas? An eagerness to embrace the holiday, whether that means with all its religious significance or rather Christmas as a cultural celebration of family, friends and feasting.

There are plenty of people in the world without children for whom to buy stocking stuffers, parties for which to make desserts, family members for whom to plan a holiday dinner. Christmas festivities are ultimately whatever you make of them. I’m making a lot out of Christmas because I can. And that makes the final twenty-five percent feel entirely worthwhile, no matter how much it may seem to hang over my head.

O Christmas card, O Christmas card....

Due to various circumstances -- most of which fall under the category of personal laziness -- I hadn't been to the post office in three consecutive days when my 9-year-old and I finally stopped by yesterday afternoon. Our post office box was packed with envelopes. The two of us unstuffed it piece by piece, hauled the load home, and spent a very pleasant half-hour opening Christmas cards. As I should have realized, if you're going to take a three-day hiaitus from collecting your mail, mid-December is not the optimal time to do it; on a typical day during the holiday season, we receive as much personal mail as we often receive in an entire month or more at other times of year.

But it was worth it, because catching up on the trove of cards that had arrived during that time was so much fun. I know a lot of people don't enjoy Christmas cards as much as I do, but for me it's a hallmark of the season. And even though lots of satirists have fun poking fun at the different strains of holiday greetings, I can only say that I like them all. I like the posed, professionally produced family portraits. I like the funny offbeat candid snapshots of kids running through pumpkin patches or digging sand castles. I like those taken in people's back yards and those taken at the far reaches of the earth. I like seeing what people did in Disney World, at Niagara Falls, on Mount Kilimanjaro, in the Caribbean. I like those that were clearly intended to be Christmas cards as the shot was composed and those that have more of an "I guess this one will do" feel to them.

I like holiday newsletters, too. I don't mind when people go on and on about every twist and turn in their family's year. Perhaps because personal stories and how people tell them are such an integral part of my career, I'm interested not only in the facts people include but the subtext about what they chose to say and why. One of my friends wrote a fairly long newsletter but had exactly one paragraph about each child and one detail amplified in that one paragraph: a daughter learned to drive; a son started working at his school's radio station; another daughter is going to be in a play soon. How did she choose those singular details?, I wondered. Were there other ideas that she cast aside?

A few details that friends have chosen to include in the past struck me as unusual enough that I still remember them years later. One friend broke the news of her divorce, apologizing ahead of time for breaking the unspoken rule of including only good news in Christmas cards. Two different women I know who are both mothers of men in their 20's routinely discuss the goings-on of their sons' girlfriends, which I find a little odd -- these aren't even members of the family. But it's still interesting. One of my husband's childhood friends even once started a Christmas card with "Thank God that for once we don't have to start with the news that Tina is pregnant."

Our own Christmas card situation has me annually tearing my hair out. I decided the first year Rick and I were married to write a 12-stanza poem describing our year. It was a fun way to narrate events, and I discovered that the kind of people who complain in general about holiday newsletters don't seem to mind poems because of the poems' innate tongue-in-cheek quality: we're not boasting about anything, we're just trying to come up with rhyming couplets. After we’d done two years of holiday poems, a friend of my mother very offhandedly told me an anecdote about a young woman she knew who had done the same thing for a few years but then found it too hard to maintain the tradition. Needless to say, I took this as a challenge, and that's the primary reason that our holiday poem continues to exist nineteen years later. Now a small number of our friends even write little rhymes back to us.

In the past, we threw in a photo card as well, assuming that some recipients would read the poem, some would look at the card, and some might do neither. (Or both.) But as home-computer technology has improved, the cost of commercial printing has gone up, and the environmental impact of photographic dyes and materials has come into question, we ceased ordering glossy photos and just started embedding small snapshots into our newsletter.

It's one of those traditions I love for about 11 1/2 months out of the year, and then dread when it's time to start writing. But as with any big writing project I face, the sense of relief I have when it's behind me makes all the stress seem worthwhile. As Holly and I pored over the pile of cards we received yesterday, I thought about how those same people would be receiving ours in another few days. I hope they enjoy our work as much as I've enjoyed theirs. Because every single card I receive means something to me, and I hope it's a tradition that never stops.

Holiday cards: Who doesn't like photos of their friends' kids?

Christopher Muther wrote this essay in today’s Boston Globe stating an opinion that was new to me: how he emphatically does not enjoy seeing photos of his friends’ children (or his friends themselves) on their Christmas cards. I understand that holiday cards in general have their detractors. There are the proponents of the voluntary simplicity movement who take the stance that composing, addressing and sending cards is one task a frazzled merrymaker could easily bypass; more importantly, there is the undeniable reality that the Christmas card tradition generates massive amounts of paper, ink, dye and other environmentally problematic substances.

Nonetheless, if you’ve make the personal choice that cards will be part of your holiday traditions, I can’t imagine anything I’d rather see than a photo of the sender’s children.

Among my cohort of parents, I find the bigger question is whether to include ourselves in the photos. My vote is yes. We have too many acquaintances whom we don’t get together with nearly enough, and I like to see how my friends are changing and aging just as much as I like to see what their kids look like from year to year (though my reason for wanting to see this might be different). On the other hand, it’s been ages since I practiced what I preached. The last time my husband and I appeared in our own Christmas card picture was the year before our second child was born. Back then it seemed to make sense for reasons of visual (and perhaps also symbolic) balance to have the photo include one mom, one dad, one child and one dog. Since my daughter’s birth, the card has featured the two kids. After passing 40, I found I generally wasn’t feeling all that photogenic anymore.

Not only am I different from Christopher Muther in that I love seeing photos of my friends’ kids but I also relish the variety in tastes that people display as far as what kind of photo they use. How are the kids dressed? How are they posed? What’s the setting? Was it an arranged photo shoot specifically for the purposes of this card, or did the parents just go back through their year of photos and pick out their favorite candid from a family vacation or weekend excursion? What’s their attitude toward seasonality: should a Christmas card have snow and evergreen boughs in the background, or is a shot of the kids at the beach or wearing Halloween costumes just as acceptable?

As for my family, our approach has been to set up a quick informal photo shoot a few weeks before Christmas. When possible, I wait for the first snow, because I like outdoor scenes but early December without snow on the ground is not a particularly beautiful time here; the scenery tends to have a lot of mud-brown and grayish overtones even on a sunny day. Since we live on a farm, for the past two years our picture has included a cow or two, which is a goofy but fun way of distinguishing our photo from the dozens of others like it that each of our friends probably receives. In fact, I think we’re the only people we know who usually include cows in our Christmas card photo. Our results are adequate from an aesthetic standpoint: not as picture-perfect as our friends who go in for professional photo shoots, but better than the year that we ran out of time and simply dropped ourselves into a quick photo-ready pose before leaving the house to attend a Christmas party. (Unfortunately, we neglected to give much thought to background. “Nice picture of your humidifier!” my father commented that year. That might be why now I always go for outdoor shots.)

Actually, the most inspiring idea I’ve had about Christmas cards is what to do with them after Christmas. Each year I buy a mini photo album, the kind that holds just one 4x6 per page, and use it exclusively for holiday card photos that people send us. When the kids were little, they had a great time flipping through the albums to see whom they recognized, and they still enjoy glancing through the albums to find long-outdated photos of their friends.

And as for our friends and relatives who prefer etchings of winter scenes or religious imagery on their Christmas cards, we understand that choice as well. Any card is a good card, from my perspective. Even electronic cards are fine. It’s December, and one of my favorite parts of the holiday season is hearing from friends: via photo, newsletter, or simply a word or two of greeting above their signature.

What's an essayist to do when a family member puts her foot down?

My 7-year-old and I were heading out to meet the school bus this morning when a question floated out in her sweet, musical, little-girl voice. So innocuous was its tone that not until I was sitting alone at my desk later in the day did its import begin to seep through to me.

“Mommy, you know that Christmas card you send people every year? With the picture of us on it?’

“Yes!” I said, hoping she might have a clever idea for how we should arrange our family photo this year.

“Well, you know the thing you write that goes with it? The poem?”

Again I said yes. It’s a tradition I began the year Rick and I got married, writing a multi-stanza poem in rhyming iambic pentameter to sum up the year’s events, with a heavy dosage of satire poured over the corny word plays. Although the holiday newsletters that triumph every family accomplishment seem like they’ve been mocked enough over the past ten years to be relegated to anachronism, we actually still receive plenty: two-page, single-spaced accounts of what every family member has won awards for, who is solving world hunger and who is saving the whales. (The habit I find most irksome, and I know of at least two holiday newsletter writers who commit this affront yearly, is to include a child’s boyfriend or girlfriend in the account of Who Has Done Which Great Things. Spouses, okay; but college girlfriends? Gosh, doesn’t she have her own mom to write about her accomplishments?)

So I parody our lives and I do it in rhyme. It means I still get to update everyone on our list about what’s new without making it seem like I take any of this too seriously.

Holly went on. “Yes, the poem. Could you not write about me playing, this year?”

Holly’s universe of imaginary friends has figured into the holiday poem for the last two years. In 2007, Holly had a pretend husband and children; in 2008 she’d ditched the family but ran a pretend school. Other 7-year-olds go to dance class or soccer practice after school; Holly hurries upstairs to teach her imaginary class.

I thought for a moment and then answered carefully. “I won’t write about that if you don’t want me to.”

“I don’t,” she confirmed.

“I can write about other things you do instead, like how you learned to swim and ride a bike this year,” I said quickly, hoping to assure her that her accomplishments mattered to me just as much as the entertainment factor of her fantasy life.

“No, don’t write about that either.”

“How about if I check with you when I’m actually working on the card?” I asked her. She seemed to think that would be okay, and then her bus arrived, ending the conversation.

But I was left with the ominous feeling that what people have long warned me about was finally happening: I, an essayist and chronicler of family life, finally had a family member who was going to put her foot down.

And there was something particularly poignant about the timing of Holly’s question. It’s mid-November; we haven’t engaged in any holiday preparations yet, nor have we discussed a Christmas card for this year. For her to bring it up, it had to be something that was on her mind irrespective of external clues. So I know she was serious about it.

People ask me all the time how my children feel about appearing in my essays, and until now, neither child has ever expressed any concern, but this was a moment that nearly every essayist must face at some point. If anything, I was often surprised that I’d gotten a free ride as long as I had – not so much from Holly but from my 11-year-old son Tim. True, the essay about toilet-training and the one about his love of his stuffed frog were published when he was too young to read, but he was in fourth grade by the time I wrote about his fascination with his new protective athletic cup and his refusal to consider wearing anything but a red t-shirt emblazoned with an image of a ketchup bottle. He always seemed to just take it for granted that he would feature prominently in my essays about family life. And I’m lucky he was so accepting of the situation, since in time I would go on to write a full-length memoir about a year in his life, as he and I took on the challenge of a daily run together.

No doubt innumerable essayists, especially those who are mothers, have contemplated the subject of their family members’ reactions to being represented in print. I know of one nationally syndicated columnist who struck a deal with her teenagers that they had power of veto over anything she wanted to write about them. Another essayist whose work I followed for years wrote frequently about one of her two adult daughters and almost never about the other. Though some readers might have inferred favoritism, I suspected that one daughter had issued an edict against depicting her in print. And another writer I know once told me, though this is strictly hearsay, that when author Joyce Maynard was writing her “Domestic Affairs” column, her husband insisted he not be included. That precaution not withstanding, they’re no longer married.

I have no illusions that Holly will change her mind. This may be the beginning for her of a lifetime of not wanting me to turn her into fodder for my writing, and if so, I’ll do all I can to respect that. But I’m hoping she changes her mind for the Christmas card. Because although she didn’t save any whales or feed any hungry this year, I’d love to brag about how she learned to ride a bike.