Singles’ greetings
When it’s just you, there are creative ways for a personal holiday message
When Beth Tarini got engaged in 2013, she was quick to tell her new fiance that he wouldn’t be in all of the photos on her annual holiday card.
For nearly a decade, Tarini sent holiday cards full of pictures from her travels to places such as the Galapagos Islands, Bhutan, Peru. The cards were a marker of her identity as an independent single woman. Her solo holiday cards stood out from the pack of married couples with children in coordinated outfits — and her married friends always said the holiday cards made them jealous of her life.
Now married with a one-monthold baby, Tarini is learning to share, she says. But there are plenty of other senders of solo holiday cards and newsletters who feel such greetings put their relationship statuses on display.
When it’s just you, there’s less of a template for what holiday greetings should look like — and more of a need to get creative.
Travel shots are popular, of course, as are photos with pets. While she was single, Heather Sacks would send cards that were collages of vacation photos, but never selfies or posed shots.
“The way that I look at it is that — my friends who have kids, that’s the focus of their year,” Sacks said.
Most of Sacks’s single friends opt for pre-packaged cards, no pictureperfect family required.
And then there’s the longer newsletter format, which allows for more nuance. At the end of 2014, for example, Rhea Yablon Kennedy wanted to send something that would update friends and family on her life, “and I knew that I didn’t have any proposals, marriages or new kids to report,” she said.
For Kennedy, her new developments were the pieces of writing she’d published or the fact that she’d cooked for an acro-yoga group with vegetables from her garden. She also included something about relationships, mentioning that she’d lost a great uncle and aunt — and noted that a longterm relationship had ended.
“I still hold out hope of finding that life partner in crime,” she wrote in the letter. “Suggestions and connections welcome.”
Janice Simon, a 47-year-old single woman, also goes for longform holiday greetings. With a big banner across the top proclaiming “IT’S JUST ME,” Simon’s 2014 letter included news about nieces and nephews, plus the birth of a greatniece. “Other people may not consider it a full life — just because I don’t have a husband and children. But it’s a good reminder to me that I do.”