(One of the things I miss in Mexico is getting mail. This is particularly true in the holiday season when one of my favorite things is receiving my sister’s annual Christmas letter and sitting down with a hot mug of coffee and reading it. It’s a letter that is invariably filled with both humor and hope, written in the true spirit of the season, with roots in lessons that we both learned years earlier.) 

My sister and I grew up in the shadow of two girls who we never met and never knew, but disliked with an intensity ordinarily reserved for the cheerleader who is also elected prom queen. They were the daughters of a high school friend of our mom, and they visited us every year in the form of a Christmas letter.

The letters arrived every December, neatly folded in the middle of a gilt edged Christmas card that was imprinted with the names of each member of their family. My sister and I read them with a mixture of disdain and envy towards the overachieving and overindulged daughters whose accomplishments and activities were so glowingly detailed.

Most years we were also greeted by a professional photograph of the daughters which we would critique unmercifully. On the one occasion when their picture was usurped by one of the family’s new house, we could hardly contain our delight in the conclusion that the girls must have turned ugly.

In reality, my sister and I were probably every bit as successful and active (and certainly as happy) as our two Christmas card contemporaries. But there was no getting around the fact that our family was several rungs below theirs on the economic ladder of success. For little girls who wanted to find Barbies under the tree but found knock-offs instead, the letters fell far short of engendering “goodwill towards all.”

Rather, they sent my sister and me straight to the kitchen table where we would draft our own family letters with boasts of every minor accomplishment we had had that year, right down to P.E. squad leader and last one standing in dodge ball.

To our mom’s credit, but our chagrin, these reply letters were never mailed, and we received little more mention in our own family’s Christmas greetings beyond the signed (and never imprinted), “Leslie, Marsh, and the girls.”

It’s in large part because of those past letters that my sister developed strict rules when she began writing her own Christmas letters. They are straightforward rules that require the letters to be personally signed and written with the spirit of the season in mind, aimed at invoking joy and laughter rather than envy.  

They’re rules that I adopted for my own short foray into Christmas letters, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree, since my more humble circumstances, as a divorced mother of two, threatened less envy than my sisters.  As I wrote in my first letter, “If you don’t like to read about new cars, new houses, or fancy vacations, don’t worry, we didn’t have any.”

Our mom continued to receive the annual letters from her high school friend well beyond the time that my sister and I had moved out and started writing our own. And, over the years, the mention and golden glow of the daughters diminished as they undoubtedly met the various hardships and realities of adulthood. 

Although there was a time when my sister and I would have delighted in this seeming downfall, our greater maturity and the spirit of the season prevented us from taking joy in the girls’ joining the ranks of the ordinary.

That maturity, however, never prevented us from secretly harboring the hope that, just once, in her later years, Mom might have snuck in a reference about her daughters, “the lawyer and the MSW.”