The holidays are a time of turning to traditions that symbolize our love and connection to our families, friends, communities, earth, and the divine.  With the pragmatism characteristic of Americans, many of us have made holiday card sending into a vehicle for mailing yearly catch-up letters.  These letters allow us to perform the task of keeping in touch efficiently.  Though full of news about family member’s achievements, honors, and chosen hobbies, the letters don’t usually reach their audiences on the deeper emotional and spiritual levels we want during the holidays.  Giving from the heart requires more than a good news report.

When I was teaching a course years ago called Writing Letters That Matter one November at the University of Washington’s Immogen Cunningham’s Women’s Center, I challenged myself to finda way to help and inspire those who wanted to write a warm, giving, moving letter for the holidays rather than the common family summary.

I was sure letter writers could use the how-to form of personal essay writing to find a topic for writing a meaningful holiday letter.  In the how-to form, an author thinks of something she knows how to do that others she cares about would either like to read about or learn how to do.  The opening paragraphs describe what this process or product are and why it is important to the author.  On of my students, Virginia Harding, wrote a short essay called “A Holiday Gift,” in which she described a ritual her family with six children performed each winter harvesting persimmon fruit and making pudding.  The fruit itself seemed to be about the transformation and glory of the season, she wrote, because it changed the yard to a “gallery of color” in winter.  It was a visual gift and also a nourishing gift, inviting animal and human activity as squirrels, robins, bluejays, mockingbirds, opossums, and people pecked at, ate and collected the ripe fruit.

Virginia said in her writing that she hadn’t harvested persimmon and made pudding for 10 years at the time she was writing and she no longer lived in Palo Alto, CA where the trees had grown in her backyard.  But writing about the ritual and the fruit, she noticed an ad in her local Northwest paper about a market offering persimmons for sale.  She hurried in each day for three days only to find the fruit hadn’t arrived and the manager had no idea why.  She decided to substitute banana or pear pulp with lemon saying in her letter, “But so what?  Christmas without the family persimmon harvesting isn’t the same either.  The important thing is that the spirit around here is as strong as ever.”  Writing about the process led Virginia to an epiphany, one she may not have had or phrased as well, if she wasn’t writing about the process of gathering persimmons for the ritual persimmon Christmas pudding.

It is the writer’s sense of discovery that moves the reader.  It is just this sense of fresh insight that is missing in the letters we so often find tucked into the holiday cards mailed to us.  When the writer hasn’t used writing to discover something new, however small, readers find nothing that moves them emotionally.  When we reach new discovery, we have grown and when we share it in our writing, we connect deeply to others.   This is part of the holiday spirit, and a part we can foster in our letter writing.

Virginia included her recipe for persimmon pudding in her letter. She wrote so well her letter was published in Messages From the Heart, a literary journal that used to be published in Tucson, Arizona as “a quarterly publication of writings, specifically letters, which nurture understanding between people.” The editor added a note below the essay which read, “Believing that a letter is a gift from the heart, Virginia Harding wrote ‘A Holiday Gift’ about a special tradition and sent it with the recipe above as her holiday message of love and good wishes for friends and family.”

Whether you know how penguins raise their young or how to make your great-grandmother’s potpourri, when you write it down for others, you will find an epiphany from life that will delight and move them.

In addition to the how-to form of the personal essay, there is another form that is useful in writing holiday letters that offer discovery for the writer and reader alike.  In the cause and effect form, the writer thinks about events and decisions that have had the most impact during the preceding year—examples might be the birth of a child, the death of a pet or loved one, a move to a new city, beginning a meditation practice, acceptance into a program, taking on a leadership role, stopping each day at a local grocer’s, or deciding to tutor an adult in literacy.  The letter writer will first describe the event or decision with words that appeal to the senses.  When readers see, hear, taste, touch, and smell written experience, they live it themselves.  All of us are connect most deeply when we share actual experience.  In contrast, summaries of experience that use words like “wonderful,” “heart breaking,” or “adventurous,” for example, indicate how the author wants us to feel and think but don’t allow us to achieve these feelings ourselves from the sensory information in the experience.  Better to say, “The waves came over the boat washing everything we hadn’t tied down away,” than “Our time on the boat was harrowing and frightened us enormously.”

In the cause and effect form, the letter writer next describes the changes in her life and in her perceptions caused by the event or decision.  There is bound to be discovery for the letter writer as she recounts the event or decision she chose to write about and details the impact of it on her life. One of my students, Tri Nguyen, the son of refugees from Vietnam, wrote about the effects on him of getting up early to watch the sun rise on a day he was visiting on a farm.  He describes scooping up grain with one hand and picking up a small chick with the other, then sitting cross-legged on the grass.  He writes, “As I bring the hand with the grain to the one with the chick, I think of the simplicity of the world and how the sun just now has risen over the mountain peak to warm the earth and my face.  This is a new day.”  I never read these words without seeing in the action of his hand bringing the grain to the chick’s mouth, the sun rising over all of us and nourishing us. This kind of contemplation offers information from the inside of one person and speaks to the insides of others. Tri is renewed and reading him, I, too, travel back to a nourishing simplicity and feel the ways I belong to the earth.

This holiday season, remember how important your particular experience is and how in writing it down for others, you will find discovery for yourself.  Sharing the discovery is the gift inside your letter, whether it comes from writing about how a particular thing you care about is done or from writing about a particular impactful event.  You may feel strange centering your holiday letter on one thing, especially a little thing, and not writing everyone’s news, but give this idea a try.  Using writing to share epiphanies from personal experience connects you deeply to yourself and then to those you care about.