Holiday Letters and Fruitcake

Thoughts on holiday letters, fruitcake, and some knitting calm

An old pen and ink drawing. A. Cowen, 2010

“Find your calm.” A. Cowen 2023

Hello and happy Sunday!

We’ve crossed the mid-month date, and yet the month felt like it was slipping away even before it got to double digits. It’s funny how December does that. I think knowing I have a few days and half-days off makes things feel more hectic. There is a lot of working double time in advance to make those stolen hours possible. Plus, I know that time changes in these days. It becomes harder to find the time for my things…. my daily journal work, my reading, my time spent tweaking my own files and systems, and my writing. The margins are paper thin.

But the time will be good. We will play many, many games, I know. As I write this intro, my mom is waiting in the airport for her flight. My kids are both finishing up finals for the semester. I found the box with the crystal garland wrapped in lights and brought it up and moved enough of last year’s ceramics creations to clear the space. The garland just fits across the tv cabinet and bookcases. It is chunky and white, but we wrapped it twentyish years ago with a strand of lights. It is my favorite thing. I can say that partly because the tree was already up. The tree has stood, untouched, for two full years now. It’s been three Christmases since I thought that leaving the tree up for the coming year might be symbolic, might be meaningful. I thought there was a reason it would be “the year the tree stayed up.” Now it’s been two.

While I’ve said we are taking it down this time, I know, really, the reasons are still the same. I’m almost afraid now to take it down and tip the scales.

I feel the need to interject a pithy fruitcake line, and I just can’t seem to find it. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten fruitcake, but Fran at Becoming has written about it in a few posts. When it first came up on her substack, I thought it sounded okay. I puzzled over why fruitcake has (at least in my vague awareness of it) such a bad rap. When I look at her recipe, I don’t see the “thing” that is in my head as “fruitcake.” We probably will make brown raisin bread, which at one time was baked in aluminum cans. Maybe we should just throw candied fruit into the mix.

I think in this year I really deserve a fruitcake line.

It’s too early to think about “the year.” A lot of people start harking their year-end wares and offerings early in December. By today’s marketing standards, I guess I should have started talking before Halloween about how to wind down your year. But I really hold onto the slowness of the month as much as I can. I try to slow it down even as it trundles by, a tourist hanging out the door of a cable car, striped scarf billowing, a fruitcake under one arm. (See what I did there?)

I have a simple set of questions I use at the end of the year. I have a set for “life” and a set for my “creative life.” The “creative life” questions go along with a short set of “planning” or “thinking” questions for the creative year to come. I do all of that after Christmas. In the week between Christmas and the new year, I think all the thoughts, consider a word for the year, and try to gather the loose ends. So, that is all coming. (There is a sketchnote component, too.)

I try not to worry about the fact that I put all of that off until the very end. The final week seems sufficient. But it strikes me that today, I took a back-door into year-end reflection.

Today:

• Holiday movies

• A holiday letter

• The panel (+ knitting)

• A Sidewalk Oracle read along

• A nutcracker update

• Old Shows, including readings of The Velveteen Rabbit and the “Gift of the Magi”

• Prompts for Week 51 of Illustrate Your Week

Thank you for reading. I hope you are finding ways to slow down and savor the month, whatever it means to you.

Amy

Holiday Movies

I watch a lot of holiday movies. My son recently observed that I have a pattern, Harry Potter, Gilmore Girls, holiday movies…. Apparently that could be my TV year. Really, I don’t think that’s a bad lineup. In December, I do watch holiday movies. I watch holiday movies all month long.

Apparently, that’s odd.

But it’s also a touchstone of connection with my mom. We talk through the month about what we’ve liked and how bad they seem this year overall. There are trackers involved.

I haven’t watched any of our “real” holiday movies yet. There are a few we try to watch every year together. Our short list of annual rewatches includes:

• Family Stone (Diane Keaton)

• Love, the Coopers (Diane Keaton and John Goodman)

• Family Man (because we connect it to one of my pregnancies)

• The Holiday

If we extend things, we like Tim Allen’s The Santa Claus and Miracle on 34th Street. There are others that make my personal list of rewatches, on my own. (That list is growing.)

In the early days of December I mostly watch Hallmark and Lifetime movies. I set a bunch to tape and then watch something while I have dinner and then while I draw.

Sure, plots are thin. Sure, plots are predictable. Sure, plots are unrealistic. Sure, plots are repeated. I could write an entirely different post about holiday movies, but I watch them even though they might seem out of character for me. There is something easy about having them on, something nice about the holiday cheer, the emphasis on traditions, the warmth of families, idyllic lives full of friends, coffee, cocoas, snow globes, and plenty of sparkle.

(Find me a small Christmas town where I could live, sure, maybe in a lighthouse…)

A Holiday Letter

One of the movies I watched this December, and it was a cheesy one, started with a holiday letter. You know the kind, a top ten list of sorts of all the happenings in a year. It’s a “catch-up” letter. It’s often a humble brag. It’s often not just 10. It’s sometimes a newsletter. It’s sometimes a production. It’s sometimes a work of art or a graphic design confection.

Do you write this kind of letter? Is this a tradition of yours?

The holiday letter is, at its self-indulgent, “life is like a box of candies” core, a way to give a summary update.

• “This is how the year went.”

• “This is who we are right now.”

• “This is who I am.”

• “Here are the awesome things that happened (or that we did).”

• “Here was the tragedy.”

• “Here is something witty.”

The yearly letter captures a snapshot of you and your family in a given year. Things change. People change. Over time, these letters could be laid side by side and snapped together to form a picture of a life, a jigsaw taking shape, each letter giving anchor points to the past.

Compared to the blur the past sometimes appears to be, a thousand pieces of hazy lavenders, pinks and blues for sky or a thousand pieces of darker tones through storm, the pastiche of yearly letters offers a simple way to put a handprint in cement.

But some things don’t change.

Some years aren’t happy.

Some years don’t have much to brag about.

Some years look an awful lot like the past.

The movie that made me think about holiday letters this year stuck with me because of a single moment in which it was revealed that one member of the family had been secretly sending a holiday letter for years because they were proud of their family and life. The annual letter was a secret though because their partner couldn’t fathom a letter because life wasn’t perfect.

Can we only share when we have the polished, glitzy, bow-on-top, tinsel-loaded, king-of-the-world life? Is that what we expect from others when we receive a holiday letter?

Is there room in our friendships and families for simply wanting to know what is going on with people even if things are rather plain and humble? Do we still deserve to claim the contours of a year when they are entirely quotidian?

When the boys were young, I wrote a few letters. I doubt I could find copies of them now. I know I sent them a time or two, maybe more. But I have very little family and no friends. As years moved on, there were no more letters.

There are three I receive each year. One is a classic brag, but I always find it interesting. One is from a distant family member. The other is from a family across the street. Their letter contains a summary about each of the two boys and something about each parent. I don’t know this family well. The oldest routinely distributes the next installment in a folded and stapled graphic novel. (You know I love that!) The kids work together on an ad-hoc “newsletter” they drop in mailboxes. The mom makes the best granola I’ve ever had in my life, and they drop off jars of it on our steps for Mother’s Day.

I enjoy their letter. Reading it this year, it struck me how much I enjoy it.

I think I’d like to read a holiday letter from lots of people. I think reading these letters satisfies some hunger, some curiosity about other people and other people’s lives.

These letters bundle, concisely, the good, the bad, the brag, and sometimes a joke or two with a bit of sparkle. These letters assume that life is worth sharing, that the details of individual lives matter.

Part of the allure of a holiday letter is that it is often a list. It’s easy to read, easy to take in. This is life distilled, cooked down until just the essence remains…. The essence of the year, the mix of candied fruit.

I thought about what would go in such a letter, if I were to write one this year. The last time I did this, I think I alternated green and red lines of text.

I first wrote a summary line that felt a bit heartbreaking. But I knew that even within that, there are moments of good, moments of peace, and, always, a creative foundation, one that finds satisfaction (if not success) in weaving words and art.

I made a list, letting slivers of the year rise and then fall to the page, curious to see what might appear in the pile of tinsel of memories from the year, the little bits of shine that stand out.

I was going to share my fruitcake-in-hand letter today. But in the end, what I want to do is suggest you write your own.

Think of your letter as a list. Think of the list as a way to parse the year into nice and orderly bulleted or numbered lines. Write it with a family member or best friend or new friend in mind. If you don’t have anyone else to write it to, write it to me.

Two approaches can help you organize and wrangle the details:

1. A top 10 (or 12 or 15 or top X in X year, 23 in 2023, for example)

2. A “by the numbers” list (e.g., 1 graduation, 4 hospitalizations)

Write it. Include it in your illustrated journal. Sketchnote it. Draw in bits and pieces. Find your own way into the list.

If you stopped documenting your life at some point because it didn’t seem big enough, flashy enough, or exciting enough, I think it’s time to reclaim the holiday letter.

At least write it for yourself.

“Find Your Calm”

I was planning to do a list panel when I drew the anchor image for today’s panel, a list panel like last week. I am thinking this is going to be a format I continue.

I finished two knitted gifts, and then I weighed the need to start another. I rolled the yarn. I picked the pattern. And then, I just couldn’t cast on. I admitted that I would have to spend all of my free time working on it, and I still probably wouldn’t finish in time. I knew things would get complicated when my mom arrived because we have a tradition of working on a shared project during the holiday visit. I decided not to cast on.

Instead, I pulled over a basket that contains a project Mom and I both started two years ago. She finished hers and went on to make another. I got as far as I got while she was here and then never picked it up again. I thought I just had the downward swoop of the final sleeve to do. I pulled out my notes from an old journal, took photos and imported them into Goodnotes (my new favorite system for tracking/annotating my knitting), and I picked up the project.

It’s a shrug-like thing that I made using a dozen or more different yarns, mostly deep purples, blues, greens, and grays blended together, shifting color every two rows. It is large and shapeless. It is meant to hang. If I was thin, it would be beautifully large and shapeless. It would drape. I’m not, and I don’t know how this shrug will work when finished. But, I picked it up, sorted out that I think I still have 100+ rows to go (more than I thought) before I start the actual decrease section in the round where everything comes back together to make the cuff of the final sleeve.

I had hoped I might finish before we start this year’s project. That won’t happen, but I’m hoping it might be my year-end finish. When I worked on it before, I was meticulous about the blending of the yarns and the system of striping. This week, I just started knitting. I wished, overall, that the colors were more lavender, lighter, a bit softer. I joined a small ball of a lighter purple and knit until I ran out of yarn.

I worked on the digital drawing for this panel one night while I sat in the car waiting for my son’s class to end. I was parked by a blindingly bright car charging station display. The flickering and shifting of the light in the almost two hours I sat there was surprisingly uncomfortable. “You could have moved the car,” he said when he got back in. Instead of doing that, I drew in the loose impression of the knitted fabric from the photo I’d taken of my hands, kicking myself the whole time for how much of it there was. That night, I had wanted to block in the list for this week. Instead, I blocked in what felt like hundreds of lines to render the suggestion of the knitted fabric pooling in my lap under my hands.

Once I had finished, the list didn’t appear. The drawing could have been the anchor for this week’s “here I am” list, but it felt like the moment captured by those hands was all about calm.

If I made a list though:

List panel with knitting illustration. A. Cowen 2023

A Nutcracker Update

I said I would share nutcrackers this week, but I don’t have pages photographed. I am, however, on track. A nutcracker a day in my illustrated journal. It’s been interesting, but even more interesting to me is how many nutcrackers I have noticed. So many nutcrackers. So many gnomes, too.

A nutcracker in front of a house in San Francisco. A. Cowen, 2023

I am drawing a series of nutcrackers, but nutcrackers are not the holiday thing I hold closest or most dear. Nutcrackers are not symbolic for me, not philosophical, not meaningful. Some of you know what my favorite thing is.

Old Shows, The Velveteen Rabbit, and the Gift of the Magi

I put together a list of some older shows from Decembers past. Mixed in, there are two “readings” — The Velveteen Rabbit and “The Gift of the Magi.” I’d like to think these still have some life in them.

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” — The Velveteen Rabbit

Illustrated journal page, November 2022. A. Cowen

A Magical Start Read Along

Several people have expressed interest in a read along of Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life (Robert Moss). I’ve mapped out a tentative reading timeline, which I will post next week, for anyone that wants to read along.

This will be a very low key read along. If there is interest, I will post weekly summary threads and invite conversation in the comments (the way I did last spring when we read Write for Life). It can simply be nice to read together. Having a timeline also adds a bit of structure to the process that can be helpful. (If people are interested, instead, in just reading and having one post where we have a discussion at the end, we can do that instead.)

This book contains a series of 17 “activities” in the second half, so we’ll be allotting a few days each so that you have time to try those, if you’d like. I think there will be a lot to track/document/record with this book.

If you want to plan to read along, the first chapter will be targeted for finishing around January 4.

(The read along would then go through March. (Check your library. Place a hold. See if the stars line up.)

Worried you might not like it or find it too “out there”? This title won’t appeal to everyone. There is no commitment in the process. If you are curious about the book, start with us and see where it goes.

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

Your comments are a special part of each weekly post. I really appreciate your words and the time you take sharing here with me and each other.

This week:

• Elf if you are of the “Elf on the Shelf” era (and had one or had one with your kids); Elmo if you predate that; Sock if these have no resonance

• Grinch, Scrooge, Cindy Lou, or the conductor on The Polar Express

• Something that makes you nostalgic (or something you are nostalgic for)

• One thing that would go on your holiday letter in a list

🎯🖋️ The Week 51 prompts for Illustrate Your Week are available.

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