Life-Writer's Notebook

Writing the Holidays
Whatever religious traditions we celebrate, the Yuletide holiday season is one of the most important times of the year. It is a treasure box of memories, some happy and light, others dark; some we'd like to remember forever, others we'd like to forget. But as you celebrate this holiday, remember that the season is also a good time to open the treasure box, unpack those memories and experiences, and write about them. "That's hard," I hear you say. "All that old stuff is jumbled together. They're tangled up worse than a half-dozen strings of holiday lights. It's impossible to separate them."

Maybe, maybe not. Ill bet you remember more about the individual events than you're giving yourself credit for. What's more, it's important to recall these repeated events, whether holidays, birthday, or any other regular special occasion, because they provide something like a "marker" for the calendar of our lives. Remembering them, we can recall who and what we were, back then. Remembering them, we can chart our growth.

Here are some ways you can write about holidays past. (I'll use the word "holiday" here, but remember that you can use these writing techniques to work with other annual occurrences in your life, as well.)

• Make a list of every Yuletide holiday in your life, by year. Then note down the place in which you celebrated, and the people who celebrated with you. If you have photos of these holidays, you might include them, as well.

• Using this annotated list as a guide, begin to fill in the blanks by recalling the most memorable—joyful or painful—holiday of each decade of your life. What makes it stand out from the others? What else is going on in your life at this particular time? Write a 3-sentence description of each of those special holidays.

• Look at your list of memorable holidays and choose one—the most memorable of your life—to describe in much more complete detail. What makes it stand out the most? Where did you celebrate this holiday and how? Who celebrated it with you? What did you do? What else was going on in your life at this time?

• Ask others in your family to help you create a "Holidays Past" album of photographs, recollections, reminiscences. (This might be done in a scrapbook or even on the computer.) Each year, add to this album.

Perhaps now that you've looked at these possibilities for writing, you can guess why it is so important to be able to write about repeated special events. For one thing, a collection of holiday stories could become part of your family tradition, to be shared with and kept alive by future generations. For another, each holiday carries a great deal of family, community, and cultural significance, and our lives are shaped by these forces. Writing about them (whether we think these forces were positive or negative) can help us understand more about ourselves. And finally, we often subconsciously trace the trajectories of our lives by these special "markers" (holidays, birthdays). Making that process conscious can teach us something about the way we have grown through the decades.

There's no time like the present to begin writing about the past—so let's get started!
--Susan Wittig Albert