It has your address handwritten and a vaguely Christmasy address label for the return address. The letter is from someone you’re quite sure you’ve never heard of in your life. You open the envelope with trepidation – what if there’s anthrax in it, or what if it’s a letter bomb? Oh no, my friend. I’m afraid not. You see, you’ve stumbled onto something far, far worse. Upon opening the envelope, you discover a letter on outrageously cheesy stationery festooned with a somewhat unlikely and out-of-scale almagamation of poinsettias, snowflakes, AND Santa Claus.
But the stationery isn’t even the scary part. Your eyes grow a little wider, because by now you’ve realized what you’ve just opened. It’s that horror of horrors, the Christmas letter. Go back, go back! But you aren’t going back, you’re looking at it with a faint look of incredulity and a lack of real recognition as to how tremendously frightening this is. And because you’re a masochist, you just have to go and READ the damn thing, don’t you? So you start reading the letter. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
Wow. Ok, maybe this isn’t as bad as you’d thought. Whoever the hell this is has grandkids that are just great. One has evidently won the Nobel Prize in physics at the age of twelve, another is getting her novel published, and the three-year-old is training to become a lyric soprano. Oh, and the oldest one just got released from prison because he turned 18. And they’re sure he’s fully rehabilitated and there won’t be any repeats of the “knife-throwing at the movie theater” incident of several years back. How nice for them.
And now it really starts getting fun, because now, the medical writing begins. Millie has a condition with a long acronym and a name you couldn’t pronounce if you tried. And the writer of the letter, well, she had surgery to remove her bunion last week and is recovering from a urinary tract infection.
After vomiting a few times, you return to finish the letter – after all, it can’t get much worse, right? Actually, oddly enough, for once you are correct. Now you get to see a brief recap of the year of these people that you still don’t think you know. You get to find out who died, and of what. The tragic accident with the weed-whacker is high on the list of amusing deaths, and the vacuum-cleaner-in-private-area thing is by far the funniest maiming.
And suddenly, you reach the end. A signature, and underneath it a name. Jane? Who the fuck is Jane? Oh. You remember, now. It’s that one friend that your mother’s cousin had, the one who gave you five dollars at graduation and you had to send a thank-you card to, anyway. And you see the bottom of the stationery.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, it says. Well, it would have been, you think as you drum your fingers together, wondering exactly how much it costs for weapons-grade anthrax. It would have been.