From Letters of Note, A Christmas Letter from John Steinbeck

Atwater Market

All of the letters of note are good, but this particular one really hit home.

I am guilty of buying too many people too many gifts at Christmas, especially my "kids" who are now grown and properly launched and don't need a whole lot.

Maybe next year will finally be the year that I cut back, for real, instead of just threatening to do so. It will be a Christmas with only made-with-love gifts. Like the sponge toffee I made this year.

(If you want the recipe, I can put it in another blog post. It's easy peasy and so delicious you'll think you're eating angel wings. Or what I imagine angel wings taste like. Ach, now I'm thinking, "Okay, what kind of person pulls the wings off an angel in order to eat them? That's sick!")

But I digress.

From Letters of Note, from John Steinbeck.

 New York
1959
Guy Fawkes Day

Dear Adlai,

Back from Camelot, and, reading the papers, not at all sure it was wise. Two first impressions. First, a creeping, all pervading nerve-gas of immorality which starts in the nursery and does not stop before it reaches the highest offices both corporate and governmental. Two, a nervous restlessness, a hunger, a thirst, a yearning for something unknown—perhaps morality. Then there's the violence, cruelty and hypocrisy symptomatic of a people which has too much, and last, the surly ill-temper which only shows up in human when they are frightened.

Adlai, do you remember two kinds of Christmases? There is one kind in a house where there is little and a present represents not only love but sacrifice. The one single package is opened with a kind of slow wonder, almost reverence. Once I gave my youngest boy, who loves all living things, a.....

To read the rest of the letter, follow the link below.

America is like that second kind of Christmas.

Stephen Fry and Sunny Days

A blog about letters of note. Or as the tagline says "correspondence deserving of a wider audience" and I agree wholeheartedly.

Let's start with Stephen Fry, shall we? Because I love him. Because I saw him in London at the premiere of V for Vendetta which was not intentional, but a happy coincidence as I passed through Leicester Square on my way to a play and there he was, towering above the crowd, being as gracious as only he can be.

A woman wrote to him saying she was desperate and depressed and felt she had no one to turn to. He wrote back, and said in part:

I've found that it's of some help to think of one's moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather:

Here are some obvious things about the weather:

It's real.
You can't change it by wishing it away.
If it's dark and rainy it really is dark and rainy and you can't alter it.
It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row.

BUT

It will be sunny one day.
It isn't under one's control as to when the sun comes out, but come out it will.
One day.

It really is the same with one's moods, I think. The wrong approach is to believe that they are illusions. They are real.

If you wish to read this letter in its entirety and other wonderful correspondence, go to LETTERS OF NOTE and look around.

(My favourite letters include two replies to artist Haymes when he sent out a questionnaire to over 500 artists and people of distinction to ask them to describe the sky. One is by Isaac Asimov and the other by Jerry Kosinski. Beverage alert. Don't say you weren't warned. Read them HERE.)

Have a great weekend!