Annual Family Newsletters...

I think I liked it better when Christmas cards (to be politically correct, Season’s Greeting’s cards) were just Christmas cards. A pretty picture on the cover, a nice sentiment inside and a brief note that indicated the sender was well and thinking of you during the holiday season.

With the introduction of the personal computer, we went newsletter crazy with all the fun fonts and pictures at our fingertips. America got into sending update letters inside the cards. I did it too for a while. It wasn’t bad if you had a good year and had lots of positive things to report. In a bad year I’d write something funny. In a really bad year, I’d just send a card and let them wonder, and hopefully assume, that I had such a great year I didn’t want to rub their faces by writing about it. I always hate it when I get a newsletter from a friend whose family seems to be getting along great and doing everything my family isn’t doing. By the time I get to the end of their report, I’m so depressed, I make a note never to send them one of my family newsletters because it would be pathetic by comparison.

This past season my mother got one of those “We are a perfect family” newsletters from one of her friends. It read something like; “Jeanie and I just love it here in The Villages Retirement Center in Florida. We feel like we’re on vacation all the time. We’re in Ocala, which is only an hour drive from DisneyWorld and other major theme parks. We love to attend the many concerts and fairs that are available to us here. And since we have such a good retirement package, we never have to worry about money. Kids and relatives come to see us all year and I have to say, I never thought life could be so wonderful.” There’s more, but that should sufficiently depress any normal person.

My mother, Joan, was certainly down after that letter. But then I pointed out to her that that letter was written by Tom, the husband, and men often have a different take on things. I told her I bet that if her friend Jeannie had written the letter, it might read differently.

“Hi Joan! I hope everyone is doing well. I’m hanging on okay down here in this swamp. I hate this place. I can’t believe Tom got conned into buying into this retirement village. It’s rows of townhouse apartments. The walls are paper thin. All night I can hear my neighbors apnea alarms go off. I never knew humidity could be so thick you could spread it on a cracker. Tom loves it here, but you know him, he’s half in the bag all time, so everything looks fine to him. We live an hour from DisneyWorld and Tom continually broadcasts this to his whole family. Relatives descend upon us all year, like a steady stream of locust, they land, consume all the food and resources and then leave. If I have to go to DisneyWorld one more time and hear, “Hello, welcome to the happiest place on earth!” , I am going to punch Mickey right in the mouth. Tom always likes to look like a big deal, so he insists on paying for everybody. I do the budget and I keep trying explain the concept of fixed income, but I’m not breaking through the wall at all. My solution now is to tell people who want to come that they might want to wait until our quarentine for flesh-eating bateria has been lifted. That’s saved me twice so far, once from his neice, her husband, and their two monster children, who are all pain in the ass vegans (“We can’t eat this, we can’t eat that”) living on air and lettuce, but smoking dope in the bathroom and thinking that the fan and pine scented Lysol is covering the smell.....and once from his very old Uncle Mel, who consistently forgets he can’t smoke cigars in the house. He wants to be taken to all the Doo-Wop concerts which are very big around here. It’s nice to hear the old music, but sad to see how our teen idols have aged. I can hear their hips popping to the beat. Many of them have the new pacemakers with the Dance Beat, Sleep, and Viagra Active options. It’s nice to be able to share this with you, at least I know you’re too broke to visit. All my love, Jeannie.”