why not start a family newsletter? 📝🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒❣️

On a folk tradition, which I recommend to literally anyone who knows people.

It’s that time of year: the end! This is the final Tuesday dispatch of 2024, as I take two weeks off (Kinndddaaaaa.) to not-send-these-emails. This was a bit of a brutal, over-worked year and I am in desperate need of a break and looking at computer less: thus, this message. We’ll be coming back in the new year, hopefully using the upcoming two weeks to reflect and plan on bigger things to come.

To that: what do you want to see in the future? You all are the paid readers angels who make this little world go round! To help understand what you’re thinking, I made the annual Trend Report™ year-in-review feedback form to help better show up for you all. You’ll find a similar form in this weekend’s newsletter, for all readers to weigh in on what they want to see in the new year — but this one is specific to y’all in the paid cinematic universe, a group who are a *touch* more special than all the other readers out there. Share your thoughts in the form here.

As always, if you love what you read here every week…give the gift of The Trend Report™ to someone this holiday season! It will mean this little engine that could keeps a toot-toot’n along!

Every year, around the holidays, my dad would hijack the computer room hours, sometimes days. He would come out with copies and copies and copies of letters that he had printed, after drafting out the letter after work and then battling a 1990s and eventually 2000s archaic printer the size of a television. The results were stapled and packaged in discreet envelopes, with printed addresses to safely send the letter to old friends from the army, extended family members in the New York area, and other random persons from our time living in five states and three different countries. This was before social media and barely before email (or, rather, before its ubiquity): sending these letters was less a fun-thing-to-do and more a necessary means to update our community on what was happening with the Fitzpatrick-Rosario family. Was my older brother still excelling academically? What volunteer program had my mother gotten involved in? Did we go camping at whatever lake was nearest to us instead of going on a proper vacation? It was mundane and not, written with the tone of a person taking stock on their life, as if each year’s dispatch was their last. Eulogizing the time, as it slipped between one’s fingers.

I don’t think my dad sends these letters anymore, as email and social media seemed to collapse the need for updating and his chosen medium-of-choice jumped from letter writing to text messaging as he’s the type to send hundreds of words in one blue bubble, threatening to collapse this form of brief communication. Given his work in the military, these letters weren’t to network (but they weren’t not to network) but to offer proof of life: one thing you learn from being in a military family and involved in the armed forces is people move, people die, and people have their lives turned upside down, casting them to literal and metaphysical worlds apart from yours. The threat of “never seeing someone again” and “never having a chance to say goodbye” is very real: relationships are ephemeral — unless you take the time to work at maintaining them. The military is a family in and of itself — and my father took that very, very seriously, even if that setting caused some of us, um, distress. (Ahem.)

In 2020, when Bobby and I were unable to have our annual holiday party, I decided to pick up the tradition. My father had always modelled this form of communication as someone who had trouble speaking one-to-one, who found the written form to be a safe space for expression. Whether or not that’s how I ended up writing (or with a skill for writing) doesn’t matter but what does is that he carved a family folk tradition, likely carried on from his own father, who likely learned the value of this from his own military experience and from growing up in a New York area orphanage in the early to mid twentieth century. There’s an art to letter writing, one that has been lost in our all too frequent communication, in our knowing too much and somehow too little about people. I try to stay off social media as I’m always “on” for work, which is how I came upon this form in 2020: I started a family newsletter, as my family had done for years.

It has been one of the most fascinating exercises in reflection and in forming the story of your life that I’ve ever done — and I have to recommend it to you, this strange form of communication as gift giving.