This will be a long one. Bear with me.
So there was this woman at the Baltimore Sun, a Hateful Boss. (She once said to a friend of mine: “Are we supposed to put ‘Your child had a fever of 105′ on page one, so readers will know why you didn’t attend the school board meeting,” or words to that effect.) Before she was a Hateful Boss, she was an Obsequious Toady, which is often a prerequisite to achieving Hateful Boss status. And I have to give her this: She saw early that this thing called the Internet was going to be big, and she was very on top of it, and spent a great deal of time bragging about her amazing computer skills.
This is why it gave me such profound pleasure when I, a reporter of average computer skills, found the Obsequious Toady’s annual Christmas letter in the newspaper computer system’s “Spike” basket, an all-access directory. While copy in one’s private basket could be restricted, once you spiked anything, it went to a trashcan where it sat for 24 hours, available to all users. If you were smart, you erased stuff you didn’t want people to see and sent a blank document to “Spike.” She didn’t, and her Christmas card was full of wonderful boasts and brags. My only regret is that I didn’t print it out.
But the thing is, I adore such letters when I receive them. I also love Christmas cards with photos, particularly of my friends’ children. These are the cards I display every year.
My father was a long-time columnist for The Sun, 1965-1995. (In his retirement, he still continues to write and publish at a rate that should embarrass some daily newspaper staffers.) In the early years, the column was called Notes and Comment and ran without a byline, in the strange reverse snobbery that The Sun did so well. Eventually, he was granted a byline –and won the ASNE award for commentary — but the column remained very short, even by today’s standards. He specialized in presidential politics, although he also wrote about the Supreme Court and some local issues. The thing he almost never did was write about his family. As a child, I often asked that I be featured, only to be told that it wasn’t that kind of a column. In hindsight, I’m glad that I got to keep my childhood to myself.
But in December 1984, my father wrote a very personal column. The microfilm is so faded that I can’t read the first third of it, but the last two-thirds should give you the full gist.
“Janus, the two-faced god who looks back and ahead is the [indecipherable] guide this time of year. Today, back at 1984 . . . I’ve been mulling the AP Top Ten list [of 1984's most important news stories]. Was Reagan’s win a bigger story to me than Bhopal (No.2)? Bigger than Geraldine Ferraro’s unprecedented candidacy (3)? Would I rate as No. 1 the assassination of Indira Gandhi (4)? The embassy annex bombing in Beirut (5)? The African famine (6)? The summer Olympics, heart transplants, the U.S. economy, the San Ysidro McDonald’s mass murders (7, 8, 9, 10)?
My No. 1? None of the above. My father died on December 5.
The real news of the year is what happens to us and our families. One death in the family can have greater impact on an individual than 20 or 2,000 or scores of thousands of deaths far away.
A wedding or a birth affects one’s life more than any Page One headline event. A new job. A promotion. A move to another city. A new home.
Or a plant closes and a career vanishes, a marriage fails, a crippling disease strikes. A friendship ends. A home burns or is flooded out or razed by a tornado. That’s _the_ news to those involved.
Christmas is the time of year when many of us get (and deride) those ‘the year to date’ Xeroxed family histories. Mary’s engaged. Fred’s vice president of the Kiwanis club, the twins got their braces off . . . These are easy targets for derision, because it’s clearly not important news to the recipient. But it is to the sender.
Harry Golden, I think it was, once said you find the real news in the little stories on the back of the clippings about wars, elections, catastrophes. That’s true, and in many, many cases, the real news never gets in the paper at all.
It is, of course, a newspaper’s important job to chronicle elections, wars, sensational crime and punishment, social, economic and intellectual developments and men biting dogs — and we will continue to. But we know, as you know, that’s not always _the_ news.”
– Theo Lippman Jr. (c) The Baltimore Sun
Feel free to post your own “the year to date” missive in the comments. I’m going to, although knowing the history of this blog, some of you might beat me to it. Whatever you do, enjoy the holidays and I’ll see you here in 2006. where I’ll continue to work on the three R’s — reading, ‘riting and remembering.
Happy Holidays! (I love saying this, now that it makes Bill O’Reilly so angry.)
Looking back at 2005, I see a lot of work and not much play. In fact, my only true holiday was at Mardi Gras in New Orleans and even then, I had to work every morning. I’d get up at 7 or so, go to a cafe in the neighborhood and read my proofs, then read the homework assignments from my Goucher students.
I was in New Orleans when the Edgar nominees were announced and now that I think about it, that pretty much summed up the year. I got nominated a lot, I seldom won, I partied regardless, although I don’t think I ever wore my pink wig again. I made at least 30 business trips to 26 cities (New York and Chicago repeated), got to know a lot of new (and very young) writers.
Meanwhile, Morrow signed me up to do three more books, so I’m not as neurotic as usual. And I wrote more short stories, maybe a half dozen in all.
All work and no play does make one a dull girl. I’m going to try to find a slightly better balance for my life in 2006. I did learn to cook a lot of new things — most notably (and most recently) a Mario Batali recipe for mozzarella en carozza. You put good mozzarella on squares of firm white bread, coat both sides with a mixture of milk, egg, nutmeg and fresh thyme, then fry the sandwiches in olive oil and butter. I almost fainted the first time I tasted this.
I also make a mean mushroom barley soup and a healthful version of pasta carbonara.
Yours, ll
Your father has changed how I read those letters now — in fact I think now I am going to reread a few I got from my cousins, and maybe send a few of my own.
Lovely entry, Laura. And a wonderful, and true, column from your Dad.
In all the ways that really matter–health, happiness–this has been a great year. Foremost has been the ongoing science experiment of being a parent. My smart, funny, sometimes challenging children are twelve and nine now, and even more startling than the fact that I’ll be fifty in two years is that I’ll be the father of a high-school student. This parenting thing is a roller-coaster ride, but one I wouldn’t have missed for all the world.
Professionally, more hit and miss. I wrote too much of a novel that played against my strengths; it’s now residing in a drawer. On the other hand, I wrote three short stories I’m very proud of, which will be appearing in different anthologies within days of each other this spring…two hardboiled pieces and one very cozy one for 9-to-12-year-olds. As someone who hadn’t even attempted a short story in thirty years, it’s almost mind-boggling to find out that this is something I love doing.
Oh…and the person who gave me my chance to write the first of the three stories, the one that got me rolling…well, she happens to be the same person who conceived of and carries us along on “The Memory Project.”
So she can add THAT to her list of accomplishments for 2005!!
Every so often I admit to being grateful for being raised with few traditions (or by martians, we’re not sure). I was raised in a religious home, but we were Reform Jews – we don’t got lots o’ tradition. And as far as I know, no one does Hannukah letters (or indeed do we do those at Rosh Hashanah or another holiday) though I’m sure it’s a tradition that’s been picked up. Every so often I prefer it “that” way (though I’m totally non-observant); I’m grateful for a couple other things. No open caskets, no proselytizing (don’t get me started on “Mitzvah mobiles”).
I admit that I don’t like Christmas letters. I understand the pressures of life lead to a loss of communication but I don’t like hearing the news at the end of the year like that. I don’t know why not – mostly because it’s a hard time of year for me and a lot of the letters contain dismal news. And you feel bad that you didn’t know because none of us keeps in touch the way we’d like. The older we get, the more likely it is to have something dismal in it if you’re summing up a year, I think. It’s certainly been true of the ones we’ve gotten the last few years.
Summing up a year and sending it out with a “happy” card seems an odd thing to do to me. It reminds me just a teeny bit of the birthday card my (oy) grandmother once sent my mother with the news taht someone had been shot and killed. Ok, that was my grandmother (say it with me – oy) but I can’t imagine send out a card telling people that we had some real financial problems this year, that my disability caused real hassles this year and I spent far too much time getting tests and seeing doctors with no real good news…yes, there have been some good things – thanks primarily to friends who kept me from going off the deep end in several ways – but I’d feel like the letter had to be honest. I can’t fake well. ANd while I’m oh so very grateful for my wonderful loving partner and my incredible friends, telling the year wouldn’t be that positive. And that seems inappropriate, especially during the “holiday season” I mean when DO you tell acquaintances and friends whom you don’t talk with but by annual card how sucky things were? There IS no good time, is there?
Hmm, now aren’t you glad I don’t do holiday letters?
But Laura? i’m wishing everyone a “happy hollandaise” which I stole from an email from you. With credit of course!
I got to meet Laura Lippman this year and so did Abby -at the Library of Congress book fair. Abby also met her hero, Neil Gaiman, there and wrote her college application essay about his book, American Gods. We are all healthy, weigh about the same and my hair is still dyed reddish.
I hate my job, Harvey is looking for a new one,Abby hopes to go to Beloit and Ben plans to transfer to Maryland. I went to Sacramento and Poughkeepsie for work-which gave me the opportunity to eat at Greens in SF and Candle 79 in NYC(skip Candle- it is too precious- but Greens is outstanding). Abby and I went to Beloit and Grinnell for college visits in August and the following week, we all went to Vermont and New Hampshire(stayed at the Trapp Lodge for 3 nights- $55 a night on Priceline!- don’t miss the chipmunk that runs through the dining room and library each day). Sister Dale and I received some of a future inheritance(which we didn’t know existed until this fall) so we will put some into retirement funds and pay some tuition-no, we can’t buy a house in Tuscany -more like a house in Keene, NH(not us!).
After 22 years, we removed the yellow solarian from the kitchen floor and had the ugly yellow cabinets painted blue. There is still no backsplash- Harvey says he will do that(uh, oh, remember the dryer, the toilet, the shower!). However,the floor is really nice now. Our neighbor’s lab thinks the new floor is clean enough to eat from(I think she used to try to eat the solarian itself) -but then she climbs into my bathtub and eats my lavendar soap, too. We still don’t have another dog-I don’t think we will get another one so I dog sit for Cinnamon and Angie and Onyx.
I still plan to make the guestroom into my office- but right now, we still have the big bed for visitors. Come to see us- maybe you can see Tai Shan too.
Andrea
One good Christmas-related link from Florida deserves another:
http://www.southflorida.com/events/sfl-scaredsanta,0,2245506.photogallery?coll=sfe-events-headlines&index=1
I know it’s a pain to cut and paste, but trust me, it’s so worth it.
(I got this from Ed Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog; he credits another blog. It’s a good literary blog, by the way. And he’s right about “Saturday.”)
Andi, why do I feel as if you’re going to be visited by the ghosts of Hanukah Past, Present and Future, then wake up Dec. 25th and send a boy to buy that big turkey in the window? I hope there are some latkes in your future. (There are in mine — yum.)
Healthful carbonara? Yummmm…
And thanks, Laura, for bringing back so many great memories with this blog.
Love the fun Christmas letters, get a chuckle out of the boastful ones (“and after Snuffy won the Nobel Prize, we jetted off to Aspen for brunch with Brad and Angelina” – gotta love it). My brother sends out a great one that’s just photos of his kids and the cute things they say.
It’s been an up and down year. I met some wonderful people, particularly in Crime Fiction Land. There were some successes at work. But I can no longer watch the news, and there are far too many Obsequious Toadies at the office (although I got to watch one get smushed today – that was fun). And the whole work / life balance thing is just a challenge. But at the end of the day, it could be a whole heckuva lot worse, and that’s what I try to remember, although sometimes it takes a whole bunch of Ruffles and French onion dip to give me perspective.
Oh – the second picture on that link almost killed me.. CLASSIC 60′s attire, and screaming child a perfect Christmas moment
Look at Santa’s face in pic #7! Billy Bob Thornton has nothing on that guy.
And clicking through all those images quickly is a harrowing experience.
Anyone else listen to David Sedaris read “Six to Eight Black Men” on his Carnegie Hall CD? My favorite take on Christmas…ever.
I adore latkes. They are a pain in the ASS. We actually have been eating frozen ones from Trader joe’s for a long time. Why are they a pain? Because they really need to be eaten immediately and when you’re cooking a lot of them for company, you never get to sit down and enjoy the stuff. It’s sort of like French Toast. I want to hire someone to come over and cook them for me. Alas, they’re SO unhealthy – or they ARE if you do them right.
Laura if i do get visited, it’ll be nothing new. It’ll be a change at least from the usual night time visitors- i hope they don’t wake Stu up with all the kvetching and whining.
Maybe a noodle kugel, THAT you don’t have to serve up immediately. But which one? Stu and I have competing versions. Both rock.
For my daughter Katie’s first three Christmases, instead of a holiday letter I sent our own version of “the year in review.” with selected highlights from both world events and the events of Katie’s life. Friends of ours were very amused to learn that while Liz Taylor was getting married (or divorced) yet again, Katie had learned how to put her feet in her mouth, laughed at our cat, or tasted her first lollipop. Looking back on those letters, I find that I hardly remember some of the world events (“Prince marries Mayte Garcia in Paris”), but I’ll never forget the first time Katie waved at someone.
When my son Matthew was born in 2002, I was looking forward to writing another series of year-in-review holiday letters chronicling the little milestones of his early years. Sadly, he died of SIDS when he was 5 months old, so there were no “early years” and there will be no more happy holiday letters. We never know when life is going to change, and it’s a good thing we can’t know in advance.
When you have something good to tell people, tell them. People need all the good news they can get.
Karen,
You’ve said more in a few sentences than most writers can say in hundreds of pages.
I love watching writers’ minds at work. I recognize, in the Hateful Boss story, the computer-tomfoolery plotline in “Charm City.” Annie Proulx said the seed of “Brokeback Mountain” was planted when she saw an old man in a Wyoming bar full of pretty women — but he was looking longingly at the young men. Lately, I’m wondering where Hannibal Lecter came from. Ring up Thomas Harris for us and find out, will ya, Laura?
Oh Karen, now I am welling up. I used to be so annoyed at those holiday-what-we’ve-been-doing letters. I guess because all I ever did was work and don’t have kids. I thought about sending out a photo of me with all my plants but that seemed a little smart alecky. Any way, between what Laura’s father wrote and what you have shared I will be glad for the good news people want share. Thank you.
The end of year letters keep me together with the children of my friends (and the grandchildren, now), where they are, what they are doing, and how they are faring. And the best part of technology, is now we have wonderful photos integrated with the news. The brother who sends photos of his children with some of their better (or worse) phrases has a terrific idea which I might suggest to friends, if you don’t think your brother would mind, Rae.
Barbara,
Go right ahead and use the idea….my brother would be delighted. The number of “kids say the darndest things” moments are a bit fewer and farther between as they grow older, but they are still kids and they still come up with some gems…..
Thanks, Rae. And Laura, are you sharing your healthful version of pasta carbonara? I like the unhealthy version just fine, but I am willing to try something healthy any time!
My newspaper’s mid-’80s system was similar — you could send messages to others by sending it to their three-letter sign-on. I once beheld the sight of a notorious newsroom gossip signed on to two terminals at once, furiously messaging two different people, sometimes with a hand on each keyboard. I told him he was the Keith Emerson of snark.
Then there was the time he accidentally sent a message to the wrong person, in fact the person he was snarking about. However! He instantly recognized his error, leaped to his feet, ran to the person’s terminal, whipped it away (they were on these wheeled stands), opened it and deleted it before the other person even knew what was happening.
He’s at the Chicago Tribune now. Whenever he calls me, he leaves messages under the name of one of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands. So I’ll know it’s him, and not, you know, Larry Fortensky.
Speaking of Christmas memories (were we?), here is a link to Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” which I re-read each Christmas:
http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/capotechristmas.html
I, too, love chocolate covered cherries!!
Sadly we are still using Coyote … and the scenerio with the evil laughter from different parts of the room still happens. We will be paginated by summer, and all the editors are excited, I am sure in part because it will be easier to disquise their wicked ways
I was going to e-mail Nance privately, but thought I should make it public that the evil boss in Charm City was oh so loosely based on another boss, one who was never an obsequious toady. In fact, that would prove to be her downfall at The Sun — and, of course, just as she was out the door, I had actually learned how to write and report in the way that she preferred. (An aside about newspapers: They all have styles and when I was trying to get a job at The Sun, a process that took a mere decade and then ended up being the result of a merger, I tried my darndest to persuade the editors that I could abandon the snappy, brisk style favored by the San Antonio Light for the Sun’s loftier tone. They acted as if their style was Sanskrit, as if mere mortals could never learn to write in such a way.)
And I think this particular computer adventure occurred after I wrote Charm City, but I’m not so sure about that. The Sun was using an old-fashioned network of word processors, known as Coyotes, up until 2000. You could write, edit and read the wires, and that was about it. We had to insert the high/low weather temps manually and writing cutlines was so onerous that one co-worker advised me never to learn how to do it. In fact, he told me never to learn how to do anything other than write and report a story because once you knew how to do anything vaguely technical or difficult, they would make you do it all the time.
The Coyotes also had a primitive version of IM, although we didn’t call it that at the time. You could send a short message to anyone in the system and if that person was signed on, the computer would beep and the first line of the message would appear at the top of the screen. I had two co-workers who disliked almost everyone at the paper and they spent their days sending snarky messages back and forth. Throughout the day, those of us who sat in close proximity to them would hear “Beep!” and a snarky evil laugh. Then furious typing and “Beep!” across the room and another snarky evil laugh.
And THAT directly inspired the scene in TO THE POWER OF THREE, when Eve sits on the bus, listening to her classmates furiously texting and then snickering. I get asked about that scene a lot, apparently because it strikes people as some sort of inside knowledge about adolescent behavior.
And, in a way, it does.
I never liked “Happy Holidays,” or “Turkey Day.” They just sound so bland. Like you, I have changed my mind
about “Happy Holidays” because of the kind of people it angers so much. “Turkey Day” is still a non-starter.
I never cared much for the Christmas newsletters either because they seemed too full of PR spin and hype–and, of course, made me feel inadequate since I was never an All-American in three sports, the president of Harvard or a Nobel laureate. Your dad’s
old column gives me a new twist on the letters, though, and reminds me how much I miss the Evening Sun and what a good writer your dad is.
My favorite Christmas greeting is from Mark Twain:
It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us — the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved … the hated, the civilized, the savage … may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss — except the inventor of the telephone.
Mark Twain, 1878
Our newspaper just got a new computer system that’s so completely different than the old one that it’s got everyone scratching their heads. InDesign instead of Quark, InCopy instead of Word. Awful. We are the only newspaper in the country with the system, which translates into “it was cheap” because we’re guinea pigs. And there’s no IM with this one, so we’ve all signed onto Google Talk. The message system it does have never alerts us to a message.
As for holiday letters, I do one every year. I hate getting Christmas cards from people I haven’t seen in a year or more and they’re just signed, no news or photos or anything. So I subject my friends and family to the form letter, because at least I can let them know what’s up with us.
This year was the first year I didn’t have to wish on my birthday cake candles that my book would see publication, since a month later, I actually held it in my hands in the local bookstore. I’ve met so many wonderful people and writers in just the past four months, forging new friendships and finally getting over my paralyzing fear of public speaking (well, almost). My daughter performed in her first holiday concert this year as first violin in her school’s strings ensemble, and my husband is Doing Good working for our state attorney general.
A Happy Holidays to all!
Chiming in late as my yahoo spam filter ate this until today’s bulk folder perusal…
This has been a year of Dickensian extremes for me. If I had to describe it in DSM-IV terms I’d have to go with a diagnosis of bi-polar. Unbelievable and unexpected kindness from so many people in the crime-fic tribe, interspersed with gut-wrenching bummers from a couple of formerly near-and-dear persons in “real life.” Seriously don’t know if I would have survived the latter without the former–especially over the holidays.
My motto for ’06 is “more mojo, less dojo.” I wish the same in a bounty of spades to everyone, and thank you, Laura, for giving us all a virtual hearth to gather ’round. Cozy here, and the company’s fine indeed.
A very late comment -I don’t know if anyone reads these after a number of new postings. I really enjoyed this posting and forwarded it to a boyhood friend of mine. My friend and his wife have owned and run small community newspapers for the past 30 years, principally in small towns in Missouri. He also enjoyed the posting and mentioned it is similar to a of their stories, which he referred to as “refrigerator news” — local stories on local people that they would cut out and post on their refrigerator. It provided a thoughtful touch to the holiday season. Thanks.