I hail from a family of writers. It’s a nice thing to know that others who have gone before have been creatives who like to share their words with others.
My great, great uncle, Rollo Walter Brown, was a prolific writer and by all accounts was a very interesting man. He loved to travel and had some pretty great encounters during some of these travels from what I can tell from his writings.
My mother and father were also writers in a way. One of the many things that they did over the years of their lives was send the yearly Christmas newsletter to family and friends. The cute name they gave it was The Brown Daze giving a nod to our last name.
In the beginning, 1951, these were penned by my Daddy but as the years passed my mom took a more active role and added her own words to those that he shared. Pictures were sometimes shared as well as cartoons and jokes.
The subscription rate? A letter from the person it was sent to once a year.
I have recently been going through the very organized notebook that my Mother left behind that contains all of the issues of The Brown Daze from 1951 – 2015. Some years there are multiple letters due to moves or other life events that they wanted to tell family and friends about before the annual Christmas letter.
Some of the pages are brittle with age, some hard to read due to the lack of technology available to have good quality printing and the later ones are crisper and cleaner looking. But what a treasure to have these to read.
The last “edition” was 2015. I remember the following year I offered to help my mom get it ready to go but it was more than she could do at that point. In her typical manner she did not want to impose on me and wanted our time together to be that of having fun and not working on a letter. While it would have been so easy for me to help her do it I did not press her as I could sense her anxiety level was rising. Sometimes you just have to make a decision and know that it is the right one. So I did and didn’t worry about it any longer.
The last year she was able to do a letter I loved her Bible verse that she selected and I think it is pretty clear why she chose it. “For where. your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:21
How lucky am I to have these little pieces of history? I am so grateful my mom was meticulous in keeping track of these over the years and had them all organized .
Do you write an annual Christmas letter? Do you keep copies of them and go back and see what has happened over the years that you wrote about and forgot? I am sorry to say I did not inherit my mom’s ability to keep track of things like this and I wish I had made it a priority. I have failed at keeping copies of our own letters over the years so I am especially grateful that I have these.
