How to Write a Holiday Family Newsletter

by Laura Brown

Originally Published Dec 11, 2014 

The holiday family newsletter has become a tradition that, like many traditions, is both loved and despised. It’s nice to hear what your friends have been doing over the past year, but these newsletters can easily become yet another holiday-season irritant. There are two main pitfalls in creating a holiday family newsletter: boring and boastful. Most of our lives are pretty routine most of the time, and a faithful recounting of the previous year might be a little tiresome for friends to read. On the other hand, focusing on your family’s achievements can create the impression that you’re bragging about them.

Writing an engaging newsletter that your friends will enjoy reading requires a little art and attention. These dos and don’ts can help:

Do

• Open with a warm greeting that focuses on the reader rather than jumping right into reporting about your family.

• Be careful about your tone. Your newsletter is not an occasion to brag. By all means you should let your readers know about your family’s accomplishments, but it’s even more fun to focus on what family members have enjoyed over the previous year: your kids’ new interests, activities that the family enjoyed together, or settling into a new home.

• Feel free to use humor. A light, self-deprecating tone and a joke or two can help offset any boasting that might have slipped in to your newsletter.

• Give equal billing to each family member. The family newsletter can be a family writing activity. You might let each child draft his or her own section. Some families even rotate authorship from year to year and allow different family members to be the “author of record.” Just make sure you edit it before it goes out!

• Get approval from all family members before you send out your newsletter, to ensure that no one will be embarrassed or surprised by the content that you’re sharing.

• Keep it brief. Be considerate about your readers’ time.

• Use short paragraphs. A newsletter with several short paragraphs is far more inviting than one that contains large blocks of text.

• Be selective about who you send your newsletter to. Relatives and good friends will be interested, but there’s no reason to assume that acquaintances or business associates will be.

 
Don’t

• Don’t go on too long. Focus on just the highlights of the year. If your newsletter is too long, people won’t read it.

• Don’t present a list of achievements. Your family newsletter is not a competition or a job application. Including information like AP test scores or rattling off a long list of colleges where Junior was accepted is just obnoxious.

• Don’t use a lot of superlatives. Focus less on how great, talented, and brilliant your kids are, and more on how much they enjoyed their various activities.

• Don’t include anything in the newsletter that will embarrass any member of the family.

• Don’t start at the last minute. Writing a newsletter is more fun for the family and less stressful if you start discussing the content and writing your draft several weeks in advance.

If your holiday family newsletter is done right, reading it can be like a little visit with your family, and it will bring a smile to the faces of your friends and family.

Happy Holidays, everyone!
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