The ABC's of the
Family Christmas Letter
by Vincent Barry
Some of them
are month-by-month newsletters. Others person-by-person
updates. Then there are the multiple choice quiz
letters and the bullet-pointed postcards.
Whatever the form, all enact a vaunted tradition,
which I liken to the harvest mite, because it
creates in me an intense itch, one I can’t
quite scratch. I speak of the frightful blah that
is the family Christmas letter.
Do I really need to know about the wedding? the
honeymoon? the new birth? . . . the summer
vacation, the abrupt relocation? the latest
graduation, occupation, gentrification? . . .
Promotions, devotions, and unfunny commotions
leave me cold as a snowball, as do incisions,
extractions, and Braxton Hicks contractions. Not
to say the saturation of apprehension in the
household’s coloration over grampa’s
intubation, . . . sissy’s maturation, . . .
sonny’s overstimulation. Then, just when you
think it’s safe to come up for air, —zoom,
whiz, plonk!— word of a reunion celebration
. . . . Puh-lease!
Don’t you agree? I mean during the festive
season, enough of the fanfaronade and jactancy
that defies all reason?
My wife demurs. She calls me a cynic, a grouch, a
grinch, an eeyore. This year she’s trotted
out a new name to call me. “Mister—”
But I digress from the A,B,C’s of the
Christmas family letter.
Of its affectation, its afflusion and ablactation,
not to say its acervation of anecdotal applesauce,
I humbly ask: If you must, what about less
aeration, more acumination? Certainly you can
appreciate my agitation over this abomination.
And—I know you’re with me on this—
who needs more banalization, bombination, and
brachiation? Sheer brutalization, all of it,
inviting—doesn’t it?—
alcoholization, botherization and cachinnation,
not to say, more callous cornification and
calcification? Yes, yes, certainly you know what
I mean. Thank you….
Still, to my wife the letters are like cathode to
cation.
“But don’t you see,” I say,
modestly proposing a confutation certain to win
her capitulation and my compurgation, “all I
want for Christmas is a little cerebration to
fill the season’s cavitation?”
“Cavillation,” she sniffs at my
castellations, subjecting my cephalisation,
indeed my conation, to-to —imagine!—cocainization.
Jiminy Christmas! . . .
— “Marplot?”
Then, with a kindly peck and startling abruptness,
she whickers, “Why do fools fall in love?”
And just like that, there drifts into the
kaleidoscope of memory, out of the dim,
resuscitative mists of the past, a diapason of R&B.
. . . It is “The ABC’s of Love,”
the song that Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers
made popular and now, as I remember it at this
great remove in time, brings a peculiar
exaltation of vast release to my fuddled mind and,
to her smoky blue eyes, an irresistibly seductive
invitation to—doo-wop.
There then pours across the room, carried on
eucatastrophic gales of laughter:
“Do-bop-see-do boom, boom, boom, boom, boom
Do-bop-see-do boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.”
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