We once spoiled a friendship with a Christmas letter.

The recipients had had a difficult year, but our letter was rather confident and positive.

He didn't go down well.

It was said that he was too impersonal when, much later, the question arose as to why they hadn't heard from each other for so long.

The friendship had not yet been so old and strong that the recipients would have known what it was about.

Maybe they didn't have anyone else in their own circle of friends who wrote such letters.

After all, these letters are about a way of staying in touch with a widely scattered circle of family and friends, and of course also about wishing them all the best for the holidays and the New Year.

Above all, however, these documents serve to

to compensate for the lack of information that has built up from not having seen or spoken to each other for a long time.

Friends or family that you meet regularly do not actually need such letters.

But friends far away do, at least one hopes so.

Because one assumes, of course, that the recipients are still interested in what was going on in their own family in the year that was coming to an end.

Carsten Knop

Editor.

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A good Christmas letter contains a few personal, handwritten lines, but above all the computer-written, more or less densely printed letter that takes on the function of a family newspaper.

This letter is nothing individual, which in our case probably caused the misunderstanding.

It's a small contradiction in terms, a mass-produced product in small quantities that thinks of many but comes from the heart.

It is also expensive, because the letter is usually accompanied by a high-quality printed Christmas card with current family pictures.

As a rule, the domestic retail trade in the Rhine-Main region does not benefit from this;

the business is done by smart online mail order printers.

But that's a different story.

Either way, the overall work of art is created from a letter card,

enclosed letter and a small personal greeting.

So these Christmas letters are a partially standardized effort.

Everything is not always pleasant

A response to such letters is not expected.

If a comparable Christmas letter comes from one or more of the addressees, one is still happy;

but everything remains without obligation.

But what do you write?

If you have children, it's easy.

There's a lot of newsworthy going on with them.

One's own weal and woe is more boring, and as a modest person one can assume that it is also less interesting.

It is a great art to combine the two without being noticed.

We are pleased that this tradition lives on, has only caused this one setback so far and ensures that the Christmas mail among friends and relatives is really worthwhile.

The letters make you proud of a lot of what is written there.

Certainly: Not everything is always pleasant, some things give food for thought.

Did you know, for example, that the wake-up callers at the bakery could now be stored at the checkout under the name "wake-up dolls", as a letter writer from Wiesbaden assures us?

This is a good tip for salespeople when they are looking for the man in the wake-up call at the checkout.

This is a worrying development for those who say gender won't catch on until it makes it to the baker and the fan stands at football stadiums.

But there are also more serious things.

Some refugees from Ukraine are now living with the families who write there.

These people have lost most of their old lives.

And yet they give everything to maintain their family cohesion, their contact, their attitude, their discipline, their warmth, as you can read.

It gives them their dignity, something that Russia cannot even take away from them with a war.