Season's greetings cause grimaces when they're not personal enough

Before assembling that photo brag sheet for your annual Christmas card, consider my friend Carol. In a brief, but alarming moment of imagined retaliation against those "more than you ever wanted to know" newsletters, she pondered printing photos of her recent surgery with a suitable holiday greeting. She might have chosen the God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen lyrics: "Let nothing you dismay."

She resisted, but we have been similarly dismayed by newsletters that catalog, as blessings: SAT scores, bathroom remodelings, salary increases, and vacation condos.

A longtime correspondent of mine from Massachusetts – equally adept at both handwritten letters and e-mail – admits, "I was always tempted to respond with comments like, '[My son] just got out on parole, [my daughter] has been cooking up a new pyramid scheme on the Internet, and the bank is selling the house out from under us.' "

We are out of practice as letter writers, now that e-mail and blogs have taken over as the daily carriers of our casual conversations. Photocopiers, fax machines, e-mail and personal Web pages, with their capacity for speed and mass production, might seem to increase the opportunities for the sweet exchange of letters, but wait! With technology, comes a decrease in intimacy as well as a lack of permanence. Gone is the personal handwriting, the choice of ink, the perfumed or monogrammed paper or the child's smudged fingerprints or drawings. If my father had written an e-card to Santa in 1935, I wouldn't have stumbled across the letter 70 years later and realized that the young boy who asked for a toy sailboat with a jib had later become the boatbuilder and naval architect that I knew.

Fortunately, while first-class mail volume has declined steadily and the use of free, online e-cards is increasing, the snail-mailed greeting in all its permutations – Hallmark or homemade or heartfelt – is hardly a thing of the past. The US Postal Service projects that the volume of individual pieces of mail delivered each day will increase from 703 million to 1 billion during the holidays. And the Greeting Card Association expects 2 billion boxed and individual Christmas cards to be bought this year. Gimmicks like embedded electronic sounds have helped keep those sales healthy, and this year, motion or animation cards are expected to be the big sellers. Oh, joy to the world!

Still, the intimacy of a handwritten letter is as different from the photocopied newsletter or the preprinted card or e-card as a savored, aromatic soak in the tub is from a quick shower.

Scott Simmons of Rockland, Maine, treasures a packet of letters from 1899, written by his great-great-grandfather, Cornelius VanHerwerden. The script runs both horizontally and vertically across the page, and begins: "My dear wife and children, As it is about time for Christmas and I can't be with you on that pleasant day, don't forget that I am always with you in mind and prayer." Generations to come may hope you'll heed the proverb: "The word that is heard perishes, but the letter that is written remains."

In the 1940 movie, "The Letter," Bette Davis played a young housewife whose epistolary evidence might convict her of murder. Her husband's lawyer comments, "Strange that a man can live with a woman for 10 years and not know the first thing about her." If her letters had been addressed to her husband, it might have been a different story. Similarly, the English poet Samuel Johnson wrote, "In a man's letters, you know, madam, his soul lies naked."

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