[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!
Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.
In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.
I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.
Weekly Wide-Awake: A Meditation on Holiday Letters
On why I still write them, how to find words during these times , and their place in the order of things.
Growing up, our family received a lot of Holiday letters. We would put them in a wooden reindeer built to display the cards during the Holiday Season. Every year, I waited excitedly to receive the letters. One family’s golden retriever wrote an annual update. One family would travel to amazing places and tell of their adventures. Family pictures. Recipes of favorite things. Beautiful messages of joy and peace. Gloria in excelsis Deo.
I looked forward to it all.
As soon as I was an adult — which was established by me paying my rent myself in my apartment — I began writing an annual Holiday letter (maybe because I had always enjoyed receiving them or wanted to be “grown up”.) I did not think my job at the Olive Garden or my responsibilities as an AmeriCorps member was particularly newsworthy.
I wrote a Holiday letter because I understood, even then, the value of staying in touch. Connecting. Reaching out. Sharing.
(I want to say how much I enjoy reading the stories of others, too. Without question, a big part of me still writes Holiday letters in the hope that I encourage others to write/share/connect, too.)
Writing this year’s Holiday letter was tough. As I explain in the letter, finding words took time.
Peace feels like a miracle right now. Loving-kindness feels like something that has to be argued on behalf of right now. Even truth — that in most cases I was raised to believe is pretty clearly defined — feels like a victim of “alternative facts” right now.
Because writing this Holiday letter was tough, it was more important than ever. Let me explain. This year’s Holiday letter was an exercise in radical love. Radical love demands — and will continue to demand — that we reach out, create connection, and build spaces for story and safety. In a small way, my Holiday letter was my attempt to do that.
I will need to keep doing that in the future.
I will always write Holiday letters. I will always take stock of my years. I will always pause to say thank you. I will always reach out, especially when it is challenging, and I want to crawl into a hole and pretend that it will all go away.
Holiday letters occupy a unique space. They are meaningful connection that does not wait for babies, funerals and/or weddings. They are a low-impact way to flex our relationship muscles. They are valuable in the way they require sifting through what matters (and does not) about our day-to-day — it is always interesting to see what bubbles up (and does not) in our stories.
I am curious. Do you write an annual Holiday letter? (Include Christmas cards in this question.) Why or why not? Do you receive many Holiday letters? If Holiday letters are not part of how you stay connected, what are the ways you connect with people who would be on your mailing list, if you had one?
