How to Write Family Christmas Letters

1. Be yourself.
This is the cardinal rule of holiday letter writing. Write like you speak. Your letter should sound like you wrote it, not like it was penned by your seventh grade English teacher.

2. Don't brag.
If something good happened to you and your family, announce it, but keep it low-key. Readers don't enjoy gloating. Remember when you played sports in school and had to shake hands with the losing team after winning a great victory? Keep that image in mind while announcing your latest victories.

3. Use adjectives and adverbs sparingly.
If you're tempted to add words like "great" and "exciting" and "wonderful" in every sentence, take a break and see rule #1 above.

4. Be creative.
Your Christmas letter doesn't have to be a long narrative of everything that happened to your family this year. Be creative. Use bullet points, create a puzzle, or turn it into a multiple-choice quiz. You'll find more creative Christmas letter ideas at Christmas Letter Tips.com.

5. Make it colorful.
Holiday letters are easier and more fun to read when you spice them up with family photos, Christmas clip art, or other images (such as scanned children's artwork). You can also buy Christmas stationery or Christmas letter templates (such as the one pictured here) to make your letter more fun.

6. Have fun!
Remember that the goal of your annual Christmas letter should be to entertain and inform your readers. If you don't have fun creating it, your recipients probably won't enjoy reading it.

7. Read it out loud.
Have you succeeded in writing an informative, entertaining holiday letter? Read it out loud, or have someone else read it to you. If it doesn't sound right, try again.

8. Add a personal note.
Add one or two handwritten lines at the bottom of each letter to add a personal touch and leave your readers feeling good.

With today's technology, who needs a separate piece of paper for your Christmas letter? Forget about stuffing your letter inside a card. This clever design from PhotoWorks is a card AND a letter in one. The front of this 5 x 7 card offers room for a large photo and the inside offers space for a full-page letter. And you can create it all online. Simply upload a photo and type in your text. Then preview your design before ordering. You're done! PhotoWorks also offers other designs that allow you to combine your Christmas letter and card in one. Visit PhotoWorks to see more.

Once you've written your letter, you'll want to create a design or buy a template or preprinted stationery that will add color and fun to your words.

You can get printable Christmas stationery with matching envelopes online at places such as Blue Mountain Greetings.

Blue Mountain Greetings offers a 30-day free trial membership, which will give you access to the printable Christmas letter templates and envelopes, as well as printable and electronic holiday cards and hundreds of other printable projects. To see their Christmas selection, visit the homepage, click Create and Print, select Holidays on the next page, click Christmas and then select Stationery.

You can buy downloadable Christmas letterhead in kits such as the one pictured here (just click on the image), or get printable Christmas letter templates at Christmas Letter Tips.com.

You can also buy preprinted Christmas stationery at local stationery stores, discount stores and greeting card shops, or shop online for thousands of great designs. For example, see below for some of the letterhead you can purchase from Zazzle.

If you want to add a final flair to your Christmas letters, think about adding a personalized photo stamp to your envelopes. You can easily create personalized USPS stamps for the holidays with your own photos or images on sites such as PhotoStamps.com or Zazzle. Simply upload a photo, some children's art or (almost) whatever your heart desires and you'll be able to order custom stamps in minutes.

On Zazzle, you can also order a variety of Christmas stamps created by artists. Here are just a few of the holiday stamps you'll find there:

Happy Holidays Snowmen Stamps




Merry Christmas Stamp 26




Season's Greetings Snowman




Merry Christmas

You can also add a little fun to your envelopes by getting a postmark from the North Pole. No kidding! All is takes is a little extra time. The North Pole, Alaska post office will stamp all of your envelopes with their special holiday cancellation for no additional charge (you still need to put regular postage on your envelopes). All you have to do is adress and stamp your envelopes as you normally would. Then stick them all in a larger envelope and send them to:

North Pole Christmas Cancellation
c/o Postmaster
5400 Mail Trail
Fairbanks, AK 99709-9999

The North Pole elves (ok, postal employees) will then make sure your letters get sent to the appropriate addresses, just as if you'd dropped them at your local post office. But you can tell your friends they came from the North Pole!

To ensure delivery in time for Christmas, be sure to get your letters to the North Pole by December 15 at the very latest. Christmas is a very busy time at the North Pole.

If you'd prefer a postmark from another Christmas-themed city, such as a Santa postmark from Santa Claus, Indiana, here are some other cities you can use. Follow the instructions above to send your letter and get your Christmas postmark.

Nazareth, PA 18064
Santa, ID 83866
Santa Claus, IN 47579
Noel, MO 64854

Is ordinary paper and Christmas clip art is too 20th century for you? Then go digital. These days it's easy to put your ramblings online for either a short period or for longer archiving.

There are several options for putting your family Christmas letters online, including building your own web site, but if you're not quite ready to make the leap to your own domain and hosting account, here are two simple options:

- create it on a digital scrapbook site
- add your Christmas letter to a blog

Digital Scrapbooking
New digital scrapbook sites such as Smilebox make it easy to create digital Christmas letters, ecards, slideshows, scrapbooks, photobooks, and postcards online.

Smilebox is free if you simply want to make a card, letter or scrapbook to send via email or place on your blog, or you can pay a small fee ($1.99 per creation, $4.99 a month or $34.99 a year) for the option to make ad-free designs, get premium templates, and print your creations. Better yet, check out the 14-day free trial and get all the premium features at no cost.

The service allows you to add text, photos, videos and music to your creations, so you'll have a truly digital Christmas letter. Registration is free, so check it out.

Blogging
One easy, fast and cheap way to get your Christmas letter online is to put it on a blog. If you don't have a blog, it's easy and free to get one. Just sign up at a free blogging site such as Blogger, choose a name for your blog and pick a template.

Faith, Family, Friends

lisadh was on NPR's Weekend Edition with Liane Hansen during the 2007 holiday season. To listen to the broadcast, visit Writing Letters is Holday Tradition on NPR.

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