I love a fair amount of the things that make up the holiday season…I love candy canes. I love strings of lights wrapped around tree branches (though, frankly, the blinking ones make me a little uncomfortable, but if that’s your thing, go for it!). I love how many different holiday are happening all at once, and hearing about everyone’s wonderful, bizarre, utterly unique traditions (my dad reads us A Child’s Christmas In Wales every Christmas Eve. I love when you find a flicker of common sympathy with a total stranger while you’re waiting for your latte, or when someone holds the door for you, and suddenly the world isn’t such a horrible place anymore. I have been known to start dancing to the holiday music while waiting in line–and I love the people who dance with me.
But most of all, of all the things, I LOVE HOLIDAY CARDS.
Like, the ones in the mail. The ones with stamps. That people use a pen or a pencil to write out. Ones with glitter and snowmen on the front, or the weird, bookish ones, or the ones with pictures of people’s families standing in front of a picturesque sunset mountainscape. I don’t care. I love cards. I tape them up around the kitchen doorway and they are the last part of the holidays that I take down again.
This is not a plug to get holiday cards, don’t worry. But it is a passionate plea for the letter, for the written expression of human feeling. For the tangible expression of human interaction that can be read years and years later…and thereby, make us immortal.
And then, today, the internet bestowed upon me a recording of the near-perfet Tom Hiddleston reading a letter from naturalist and zoologist to fellow naturalist and zoologist Lee McGeorge, before their wedding in 1979. Brought to you courtesy of the people who brought you Letters of Note:
(http://letterslive.com/letter/all-this-i-did-without-you/)
*Passes round the tissues*
And now since nothing I will write here can top that, I thought I’d offer you a few recommendations of works that feature letters. Maybe they’ll inspire you to send some of your own? Or maybe to cherish those than find their way into your mailbox…even if Tom Hiddleston isn’t there to read them to you…..
Letters of Note: We’ve quoted from this site a few times in the past, and with good reason. The letters featured show the beautifully human side of some of the great names in history, from responses to fans and letters to editors to notes to their children and missives to librarians. This book is the first collection of letters to be published in tangible form, and makes for some sensational reading. I think my favorite is “Things to worry about”, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter Scottie, but I hope you’ll soon find your own!
Eugene Onegin: True story–the first time I read this book, I missed my stop on the bus and was only alerted to said fact when the bus driver got up and asked me to leave so he could go eat dinner. Pushkin’s masterpiece is a stunningly beautiful, surprisingly funny, insightful and remarkably accessible story about human beings and love, and the mistakes that we make on the spur of the moment. The foundation of the work are two love letters, one from the young and naive Tatiana to Onegin, and one from him to her, but the circumstances surrounding the writing of both couldn’t be more different. For more information, you’ll have to read this yourself.
The Documents in the Case: Though Dorothy L. Sayers is best known for her mysteries featuring the marvelous Lord Peter Wimsey, she also wrote this cunning little epistolary novel with Robert Eustace (the pen name of Dr Eustace Barton, who wrote medical-mysteries). This mystery is a fascinating blend of art and science, about tiny little slips of the pen, and grand theories of life all contained in the letters between Mrs. Harrison, the young, lovely, and somewhat silly young women, and Lathom, the artist with whom she carries on an affair…but as many of the letters contradict each other, it’s up to the read to decide which of these characters to trust…
The Color Purple: Alice Walker’s award winning novel of two Black sisters is not an easy read, mostly because Walker doesn’t shy away for a moment from the realities of being Black, being a woman, and being poor in the South. But her insight and empathy are so overwhelming that it makes this book a thing of beauty. This tale of two sisters is told almost exclusively through letters between two sisters, one of whom is a missionary in Africa, and one of whom is the young bride of a man who cannot love her. This book is a constant reminder of the power of words, and the strength of those words to define our lives.