My sister and I both grew up in the shadow of two girls who we never met and never knew, but disliked with an intensity ordinarily reserved for the cheerleader who is also elected prom queen.  They were the daughters of a high school friend of our mom, and they visited us once every year in the form of a Christmas letter.

These annual letters arrived in the first weeks of December, neatly folded in the middle of a large, gaudy, and gilt edged Christmas card that was invariably imprinted with the names of each member of their family.  My sister and I read them with a mixture of disdain and envy towards the overachieving and overindulged daughters whose accomplishments and activities were so glowingly detailed.

Most years we were also greeted by a professional photograph of the daughters, which we would critique unmercifully.  On the one occasion when the daughters were usurped by a picture of the family's new house, we could hardly contain our delight in the conclusion that the girls must have turned ugly.

In reality, my sister and I were probably every bit as successful and active (and certainly as happy) as our two Christmas card contemporaries.  But there was no getting around the fact that our family was at least several rungs below theirs on the economic ladder of success.  For little girls who wanted to find Barbies under the tree but got knock-offs,  the letters fell far short of  engendering "goodwill towards all."

Rather, they sent my sister and me straight to the dining room table where we would draft our own family letters with boasts of every minor accomplishment we had had that year, right down to P.E. squad leader and last one standing in dodge ball.

To our mom's credit, but our chagrin, these reply letters were never mailed, and we received little more mention in our own family's Christmas greetings beyond the signed (and never imprinted), "Leslie, Marsh, and the girls."

It is in large part because of those past letters that my sister developed strict rules when she began writing her own annual Christmas letters. They are straightforward rules that require Christmas letters to be personally signed and written with the spirit of the season in mind, aimed at invoking joy and laughter rather than envy.  She can mention beach vacations, kitchen makeovers, car purchases and accomplishments of children only when necessary to relate an otherwise funny family anecdote.

It is a rule that I adopted for my own short foray into Christmas letters, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree, since my own more humble circumstances, as a divorced mother of two, threatened less envy than my sisters.  As I wrote in my first letter, "If you don't like to read about new cars, new houses, or fancy vacations, don't worry, we didn't have any."

We both found that we still had a lot to say.  I was free to relate that my oldest daughter won the dubious honor of being named "Most Valuable Player" on a volleyball team that didn't win a single game and she was able to note the college graduation of her son since it occurred only after eight years and four different schools. 

They were rules that seemed to work, as our letters were generally well recieved and passed around, often ending up in hands of people that we didn't know and that didn't know us.

Our mom continued to receive the annual letters from her high school friend well beyond the time that my sister and I had moved out and started writing our own.   And, over the years, the mention and golden glow of the daughters diminished as they undoubtedly met the various hardships and realities of adulthood.  Although there was a time when my sister and I would have delighted in this seeming downfall, our greater maturity and the spirit of the season prevented us from taking joy in the girls' joining the ranks of the ordinary.

That maturity, however, has never prevented us from secretly harboring the hope that, just once, in her later years, Mom might have snuck in a reference about her daughters, "the lawyer and the MSW."