A Bundle of Letters

I binge watched Christmas movies from Thanksgiving to Christmas. I could have watched anything–action, adventure, comedy. I chose romantic Christmas movies. I wasn’t in the holiday spirit so much as I wanted something to pull a tear from my now chronically dry eyes. Christmas movies make it seem like life is full of happy endings. Watching them distracted me from the reality of our fragile democracy, the thinning generation of my elders, inflation, the impact of climate change, and increasing threat of gun violence.

I watched the one where Brooke Shields played a writer who wins over the affections of the man who was forced to sell her his family’s estate. And the one with Jack Black who falls for the woman who exchanges houses for the season with a woman who falls for the brother of the woman who owns the English cottage. I watched another about two independently minded Indian-Americans whose more traditional parents are pressuring them to get married. (Wait, that might not have been a Christmas movie.) I watched Notting Hill (1999) with Julie Roberts and Hugh Grant, again. I watched far too many to recall much less name. The particular films didn’t matter to me. I was only watching romances this year because I knew before I began how the movie would go.

I was happily watching The Noel Diary (2022) (it stars that actor from that tv show we all loved with the triplets) when the bliss of my cinematic retreat was disrupted by a bundle of letters. It’s a familiar trope, a stack of old letters mailed over a period of years collected rather neatly despite their varied sizes and colors but united by the common script denoting the name of the intended receiver. Sometimes the letters are bound by scraps of twine. Sometimes they are tucked into a cardboard or wooden box. Always they have been collected by someone who has been entrusted with the responsibility of distributing such letters to those who live at that address. But they haven’t in fact reached their intended reader until this moment of discovery. We feel the sense of betrayal and loss.

What does not come into the story, perhaps because it seems terribly difficult to depict, is just how intrusive a letter can be. By definition that letter is coming from someone who isn’t there. Someone who has not been present to make the receipt of a letter even possible. The movies don’t encourage us to think of that. That part is not romantic—it’s house work in its myriad forms. I’m not talking about that Martha Steward brand of perfect table settings and tidy living rooms, better homes & gardens shit. Just maintaining an address requires work. Ask anyone who actually does the work that goes into building and sustaining a home. Or anyone experiencing homelessness or living in a shelter. A letter writer takes that work for granted.

Housework and the accompanying work of building and maintaining a family is not the stuff of Christmas stories. Christmas stories are about love, choices, loss, and recovery. Even when it involves tension and intrigue, the work of house and home is too messy to be piled so neatly and held together by string. It consists of the daily grind that Robert Hayden captures in “Those Winter Sundays.” A poet can say what the filmmakers cannot. If they could say it, we might see that very often house work is the push behind the pull that carried the letter writer off into the world. Those Winter Sundays

The person who hid the letters away never goes out into the world. That person has been in the same place for all the years it took to commandeer each letter. The movies would have us believe that there’s something destabilizing and oppressive about the one who withholds the correspondence. That they are fearful of the possibilities the letters represent. These characters are depicted as obstacles, as part of the conflict the protagonist must overcome. Perhaps.

Admittedly, I would not have even read the letters the way that I am now if two days before Christmas I had not opened a large envelope addressed to me to discover three more envelopes inside. Two addressed to my adult children and a third addressed to me, with my teenager’s name penned neatly at the bottom. I passed the letters on to their intended receivers but for the first time I understood why the trope of the hidden letters was a thing. My peace is a premium now. And these letters–addressed to me but intending only to make me witness–demanded something of me that I could hardly spare. No! Enough! I am doing all I can already to make this home and keep this home safe.

Teenagers are not as easily transported to stable adulthood as two hour made-for-tv-movie often makes them out to be. And parents are not omniscient. The best shot a kid has at getting to the relatively safe haven of a mature, functioning adulthood is a parent, who is present, who willingly prioritizes the child’s needs. When someone who has absented themselves from the family decides to appear in the form of a letter, the letter reminds the kid that they are remembered by the letter writer, which is great. But it does not account for the work that goes into bringing a home back into order that inevitably follows its unexpected appearance.

Maybe one day, a woman of a certain age too will write a Christmas story. Maybe despite her having spent half a lifetime doing housework and homemaking, she will be presented with an opportunity to make that story into a tv movie. And perhaps that movie will show the work of keeping the house where that kid will be fed, the work that goes into their being able to sleep at night. And maybe, I will tear-up while watching it.