Not Back By Popular Demand

Last week, my friend Hannes told me over lunch, “Ryan, I missed your Christmas letter this year.”
I did, too.

For 13 straight Christmases, I had designed unique direct mail pieces filled with stories and infographics, photos & pun-filled headlines. It worked as an annual report for Biplane Productions and an overview of my personal adventures.

I tried to include more of Crystal’s life than was shown, but she usually required me to edit a lot of her content out of the pieces because “I don’t do that stuff for people to notice.”

She didn’t mean that line as criticism, but it proved to be the criticism leveled by others and by my internal voice. People in my church and my extended family saw it as bragging, a flaunting of a lifestyle.

I told people that I just loved my life and the adventures which I hadn’t even dreamed for myself decades ago—and loved sharing about it. I tried to justify it spiritually by saying it showed that Christianity didn’t have to be what it looks like in popular culture. I tried to excuse it as a marketing piece for my design services, which account for probably 90% of my annual income. After designing around 1,000 classified ads and 600 or so pages of client direct mail each year, it was a chance to design something for myself. As someone with an old writing degree, a quiet blog, and a flop of a nonfiction book, it let me showcase wordsmithing talent. I got to set the design and copy parameters and show my clientele what I could do with more time and money.

In 2011, I estimated that I spent $5,500 of billable time on the project. (That year’s edition was my opus and still my favorite one of the thirteen.) I’m usually next to unemployed in December; so, it was something to do.

Each year, I wrestled with my motivations for the mailing. For several years, I threatened that the current issue might be my last. After being challenged to “get small” by one of my pastors, I decided last winter that 2014 was going to be the Christmas that broke the streak. As a challenge in humility, I would forego keeping that sheet of paper on my desk designated with notes all year for the Christmas letter.

Then, as irony would have it, 2014 was one of the most exciting and fulfilling years of my life. I would tell you about it, but that would defeat the purpose of the austerity dare. Just know that it’s not exaggeration to claim last year that I experienced huge accomplishments, grand adventures, and incredible moments. I wrote about some of them on this blog and shared a bunch of them on Facebook, but they never got curated into a showcase.
No printed highlight reel. No glossy magazine pages.

It was hard. No, really.

When Thanksgiving rolled onto the calendar, I wrestled with the choice. I knew what I needed to do—or not do in this case—but I was reflecting back on a Walter Mitty kind of year. It’s not an exaggeration that a few of my childhood dreams came true. “Get small,” I kept hearing Dave say. I knew he meant that as shorthand for the Bible’s “He must increase, and I must decrease.”

It may have actually been the little red dude on my shoulder that told me, “You’re so blessed, man!” I’m not sure. I wanted to pinch myself to make sure 2014 was real. But “blessed” wasn’t the only word I felt or even the biggest word, even at the end of the year in grateful retrospection. The biggest emotion I felt was pride. I could thank God all I wanted for what I had experienced, but I was proud to have been the one on the other end of one off-the-chain year.

Multiple times last year, a person told me something like, “I live vicariously through you on Facebook.” I’m not kidding. For years, one of the first questions someone asks me in a social gathering away from church is, “So, what’s your next big adventure?”

Hannes did.

I told her that I didn’t know—because I didn’t.

Four days later, I was atop a steep embankment, extemporaneously about to attempt my next “big adventure”: downhill kayaking with a jump onto a frozen retention pond. A stranger rolled up to watch from the warmth of his pickup and rolled down his window to chat. I mentioned that I had forgotten to bring one of my GoPro cameras, and he said he’s been putting off buying one. “Once you buy one of those, you have to try big stuff.”

That stranger was right. (There’s a reason GoPro named their cameras “Hero 3” and “Hero 4.”) I’ve found courage many times by hitting the record button on a blinking device clipped to my helmet.

That’s what my Christmas “letter” did, too, even if retroactively. It added incentive where I shouldn’t have needed any. It gave me the chance to turn vacations and weekend explorations into a thematic ego trip. I became the writer you see in the credits of reality TV shows—not that I was lying or finding a story that wasn’t there but that I was intentionally guiding others’ perception of me through carefully edited snippets.

It will probably be years before I stop chasing adventure. Hopefully never, actually. And it will probably be just as long until I can keep myself from telling the stories, though I am working on giving others room to make and tell their own stories. In the meantime, though—until I break the unhealthy side of those addictions—I’ll have to keep the holiday newsletter on ice. 2014 was to prove I could resist the tradition. We’ll see how long it takes me not to pine for it.