Avoid Sending Christmas Letters About Your Perforated Bowel

Okay, confession time. I don’t read Christmas letters. No, I shouldn’t say that. I don’t read Christmas letters over 100 words. I’m like the old Twitter character limit. 

It’s not that I don’t care — at least on some level, depending on who sent me the letter. I’m just not all that interested in a four-page essay on the family’s adventures — and misadventures — over the previous 12 months. I’ll wait for the movie. And, yes, we have received multiple-page Christmas letters, which is morally reprehensible and should be punished as the hate crime that it is. 

You see, the painful truth is that your family is not as interesting as mine, and my family is not all that interesting to you. Selfish? Perhaps. But I think that’s how most people view Christmas letters, if they’re being honest.

There are those that firmly believe that there is an iron-clad social contract that demands they read every last line of the minutia of someone else’s life, if for no other reason than the pages were placed inside a bucolic winter scene-fronted greeting card. “Well, they went to all that trouble,” my mother would say. So I have to suffer for their trouble? It’s not like they donated a kidney. 

‘Concentrate on His Prostate’

Some of the worst — and funniest — family letters are the ones that include detailed accounts of health issues over the years. Far too many of these updates feature the word rectum. 

Years ago on WGN Radio in Chicago (when it was worth listening to), the hosts of a morning show would annually read such letters sent in by listeners. The ladies of the Kathy and Judy Show were as liberal as a Bernie Sanders Tupperware party, but their “Merry Medical Christmas” segment just before Santa Claus came to town was appointment radio. 

It truly was amazing the extremely personal information people felt compelled to share — in a Christmas letter! Nothing says Joy to the World like the bad news of a perforated bowel. Kathy and Judy would change the names to protect the tactless. I think the nom de plumes were always Vince and Rhonda. And boy did Vince and Rhonda endure some breathtaking indignities. 

In one letter, a woman offered family and friends excruciating details of the necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease) that ruined a good part of her year. 

“I lost 36 pounds and had to wear a pump hooked up to my stomach wound,” Rhonda wrote. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  

In another cheery update, Vince informed his readers that it seemed that all he had done that year was to “concentrate on his prostate.” He was happy the kids came home for Thanksgiving but had to keep pretty close to the bathroom. 

“Presently, I still have a short fuse when I get the urge to go No. 2,” Vince admitted. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire … 

From severe retching to involuntary urination and hemorrhoids, the letters featured on Merry Medical Christmas never failed to amaze in their vivid descriptions of the many things that can go terribly wrong with the human body. Check it out for yourself. Here’s a best-of collection. But I suggest you not listen during Christmas dinner. 

Invasive medical procedures and orifice bleeding notwithstanding, Christmas letters are a lot like the old vacation slides night at the neighbor’s. The only people really interested in them are the ones forcing us to view them.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.