A Trip Down Memory Lane Littered with Letters

Twitter x 365 = Holiday Family Newsletter.

My partner and I just finished sending out our holiday cards...er...New Year's cards, featuring an image of our 4-year-old daughter. But to some people, especially the assorted older women who love her, we sent more photos and artwork. And notes. Handwritten. Personalized for the recipient. In other words, letters!

Letters are the anti-Twitter. And the anti-Holiday Family Newsletter. Instead of putting out to the whole world how I want to be seen, with little regard for the individual (as I'm doing with this blog entry), when I oh-so-rarely sit down to write a letter, I'm thinking about my last interaction with each person and what I think they'd like to know about.

What amazes me is that I used to take the time to write this type of letter regularly. In college, twenty-page tomes to various high school friends were not uncommon. During this last presidential campaign, a minor stir was created when a man Hillary Clinton had corresponded with prodigiously during her college years revealed her letters to the New York Times. He wasn't particularly close to her then or now -- they just both liked to write, so they wrote to each other. I had friends like that. One fellow letter writer was my high school nemesis of sorts; we liked to get into heated political battles and often ended up pissing each other off. He interned for Congressman Barney Frank the year he came out. Now this made for some interesting reading! (Long ago recycled, unfortunately.)

I suppose it's not coincidental that I chose to write these most recent letters to women of a certain age. They grew up in an era when letter writing was even more common. At 40, I am right on the cusp, between old school and new media. No, who am I kidding -- I am old school, but trying my best to keep up. I vow to actively use LinkedIn and Facebook this year. Twitter? We'll see.

When my daughter gets a letter from one of these grandmother-types, her immediate impulse is to sit down and draw them a picture. It's a marvelous impulse, hands-on and personalized, a desire I want to nurture in her. Even though I know she'll surpass me digitally in a matter of minutes.