« Back to Issue 18

Not Another Newsletter!

By Hedgehog.

Oh good, some Christmas cards have arrived in the post. But as you open them, your heart starts to sink with despair - most of the envelopes also include "THE CHRISTMAS NEWSLETTER".

Every year, thousands of otherwise normal, quiet, shy, modest people seem to feel an overwhelming urge to tell the world all about themselves and their families. And to be honest, most of them are terminally uninteresting!

For one thing, the contents are highly predictable - a list of illnesses, academic and work achievements (but not the failures), holidays (the more foreign and exotic the better), births, deaths, marriages and the occasional house or job move. A few tell us about their church with lots of details about people we've never heard of and are unlikely ever to meet. By this time, Hedgehogs have lost the will to live and gone into hibernation!

Yes, I know I'm being a bit churlish here. The Christmas newsletter is a useful way of keeping in touch. Fine. But I suspect that sometimes there may be a couple of somewhat more dubious motivations. The first is that the writers think they are important enough for us to want to know all about them. The second is that they want to boast to us about how wonderful they are in comparison with the rest of us.

It seems never to have occurred to them to wonder why I might be so interested in them when they are so obviously not interested in me. After all, they haven't taken the time or trouble to get in touch since the last Christmas newsletter either! It's not as though it's difficult to contact me. I have two phone lines, a mobile, a fax machine and an E-mail address. If they were that interested, I'm easily contactable.

Likewise, if I really want to know what's happening in these people's lives, I will phone, fax or E-mail them. I might even take the time and trouble to write a personal letter to ask after their well-being. But the fact that, in many cases, I don't do any of those things might just suggest that I'm no more interested in them than they are in me.

OK - confessions time: we are recovering Christmas newsletter senders. What saved us and set us free? The quantity (almost nil) and quality (usually poor) of the response made it clear to us that few people outside our regular day to day contacts are sufficiently interested in us to actually read it. Those that are, correspond with us by other means.

Finally, there are three families whose newsletters we love to receive. Why? Partly because we know that they care about us, but also because their life doesn't revolve around holidays, exams, work and personal soap operas. Instead their stories breathe a joyous mixture of life and laughter, devotion and daftness, joy and Jesus, wisdom and wildness. So, if you must write a Christmas newsletter next year, don't bore us or boast to us - make us laugh and inspire us!

Hedgehog is a pseudonym for a charming, but occasionally prickly person.