You Should Write a Year-End Family Newsletter Even If You Don’t Have a Family
When I hear “holiday newsletter” I think, “These are the milestones that each of my seven children have achieved this year!” This is what the Times uses as an example of a good year-end newsletter . But the year-end newsletters are for everyone. Especially if you have no children.
A year-end newsletter is a way to talk to old friends and distant acquaintances – more intentionally than posting on Facebook, but easier than twenty phone calls. It’s personal, no platform, to have fun. It is not necessary to sum up the results of the year.
You should probably email it. A typed letter is touching, but too much work and people are more likely to respond to an email.
Your newsletter may be radically different from any one you receive. Maybe:
- List of times you have vomited this year
- A drawing of what happened every month
- The story of your biggest fight this year, told as if you were claiming the coveted Iron Throne of Westeros.
- What you think each of your recipients has done this year, ending with a request to respond with what they actually did
- A one-page script for the funniest moment that ever happened to you.
- Links to a few tweets that you really liked
- A complete family newsletter, but it is about you as if you were a small child, as if you were your own partner, and as if you were your dog
- Your favorite albums / movies / podcasts of the year – but you should write something about how they made you feel, or about the idea expressed in them, so that you can start a better conversation than “Oh, I liked that too.”
Or! If this all sounds too diligent or stupid to you, just write one regular letter to one specific person: a friend you were close with, whom you follow on Instagram, but don’t really talk as much as you would like. Then see if you can send the same email, maybe with minor modifications, to about ten other friends.
Then write a letter to someone you have kept in touch with, and dig deeper. They already know about your job, dating, and family, so lean on that, take stock of the year, or tell them something you didn’t know before. Now let’s see if you can send this letter to other friends.
Yes, I offer multiple email addresses for different levels of friends. But you can quit at any time. You can quit smoking after writing one letter to one person! It’s still cool!
Just write the very first — honestly, it can be like five sentences that mean “I’m still alive, I hope you are too,” and it will make someone feel good. Much better than a Facebook post or tweet, and if you add a picture there, it’s even better than an Instagram post.
Because every person you sent it to will feel special because it was turned on. And when they answer, you too will feel special, as if you have finally conquered the coveted Iron Throne of Westeros.