Above: Dottie (left, a very gangly adolescent), Emma (right; "you can't be serious about this hat.")

Yes I have a dirty little secret. (Don't we all? But it's not that I consume my body weight in chocolate every 10 to 12 days. That's no secret. Please don't sic Dr. Gillian McKeith on me, because if I am forced to look at all the little Dove pieces arrayed on a table, in front of an international television audience, I just might get confrontational.)

I love holiday letters. I'm a pantheist, or maybe a progressive heathen, no, definitely a pantheist. I don't really have a holiday to celebrate so I celebrate every day. But as the end of the year draws close and the postal box clogs with catalogs and missives from friends my happiness increases greatly. I just find those rambling wrap-up-the-year-epistles that accompany the holiday cards engrossing. I know it is fashionable to be snippy and snide about such impersonal, scatter-shot notes right now—but did I mention I love them?