Word: cards
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...practice currently stands in America, there are up to three parts to a proper Christmas card. First, there is the card itself, which is always purchased from Hallmark—no exceptions. Second, there is a heavily staged photograph of the entire family, most often in front of the fireplace with the family dog. Third, there is the dreaded holiday newsletter...
...Christmas card and its wicked counterpart—the holiday newsletter—both have a long history. A product of the Victorian period, our current Christmas cards first came into vogue in 1840s England. From the very beginning, they often included a newsletter. The entire Victorian project of keeping up appearances and maintaining a veneer of respectability made it inevitable that this newsletter was a heavily amended summary of the events of the year, of course interspersed with all of the proper holiday pleasantries...
Americans entered into this pattern of yuletide dissimilitude largely through the effort of a Prussian-born engraver named Louis Prang. Often dubbed the "father of the American Christmas card," Prang started manufacturing cards for the American market in 1875. The practice of exchanging greeting cards with holiday newsletters during Christmas time quickly became popular, as it remains so to this day. While as early as the 1840s some Americans were already sending out cards, the custom grew greatly with Prang’s efforts...
Today, as during the Victorian period, the Christmas card itself is purchased at the store, but the newsletter is no longer handwritten. In modern America the holiday newsletter is printed on the family’s DeskJet and usually has a festive border around it. But don’t be fooled by this ornament, the letter’s content is a veritable popcorn chain of falsehoods, all strung together with conventional and informal prose...
...lying is usually less overt. A more typically card would read, "Deborah has gotten engaged, and Barry has gotten involved in community service." Unlike the case of outright lying, both of these statements are true, but here the tactful writer of this newsletter simply seems to have forgotten that Deborah was already six months pregnant before getting engaged and Barry was assigned his 40 hours by a district court judge...