Christmas Newsletters

I began sending out regular Christmas Newsletters in 1991 when I moved my family of five to Wichita, Kansas, and needed to defend the decision with more than address change cards. The early versions make me cringe (in truth, so do the later ones). Self deprecating humor was designed to distinguish my Newsletter from the brag and gag pieces. A dangerous game to play, dancing with the very documents I mock. I learned a great deal. Six pages and a picture was too long. Four pages was even too long. After a couple three pagers, I finally settled on one sheet of text and a picture page where I could sneak more text in captions. I also discovered that the pretense of self deprecation was often unmasked by my readers (intelligent family and brilliant friends can recognize thinly disguised boasting). Yet I continue to tinker, seeking the perfect combination of words that would evoke the exclamation: “Geoff is my hero!” For example, I just now experimented with language about intelligent and brilliant readers. Unfortunately, I now write a daily Blog that threatens an annual Newsletter with redundancy and obsolescence. I cannot send out a 365 page document and invite recipients to find one page of suitable nuggets. So I undertook that tedious task of searching 365 posts for a Newsletter. I found I squandered valuable space on Trump, Ichiro, and philosophical nonsense. I honored too many requests from family members who took justifiable offense at being named. And I under represented East Coast family because I did not witness their shenanigans on a daily basis. I am tempted to rectify some of the imbalance in the last month of 2017 but will probably chicken out. Except I am definitely writing about Noemi and Diego the next two days.

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