Tis the season and the xmas letters flood into our mailbox from friends old and and new. Tis the season and the traditional Xmas card has been given a face lift with multiple Internet photos on laminate with a letter inside the old yuletide tradition of merry Christmas and Happy New Year. The photos are glanced at and the boy and girl of yesteryear are now lounging against cars and and looking more and more like mini adults. Then that letter falls out and sails to the floor.
You open the letter knowing full well what is coming. Uncle Bud got his appendix out but they are having a hell of a time with his colon and that waste bag, but he's out golfing and running in the NY Marathon next year and teaching disabled kids in the inner city in his spare time. Or Mary and John just bought another villa in France and their kids are off to Yale and Harvard and Jeremy has just finished a new procedure that will revolutionize brain surgery while Jack hacks it out in Afghanistan after turning down three offers from the NFL. Or maybe it is the hard luck story of Jim and Bernice who have been unemployed now for ten years and just lost the house but still have their faith in God even though Jim got run over by a garbage truck and an asteroid landed on Bernice on her way to the soup kitchen.
You get the drift. The question is are these cards more beneficial to the sender or the recipient? I would say the writer of these yuletide novellas receives the greatest bang for the buck. We are the unwitting readers of anothers lilfe and it is not even fiction. Like a lot of non fiction it falls into the mundane or the trivial or the self indulgent and the entertainment factor goes right out the window. This of course is right in line with the age of Facebook and our fifteen nanoseconds of fame. The only difference is you can just log off if you choose not to read someone's blatherings. Those damn letters have a way of hanging around until after New Years.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January
