Our family has been sending friends and family a Christmas letter now for something like 40 years. When we started, people sent Christmas cards, but not many included Christmas letters. So we thought we were in advance of the wave when we mailed out our first.

We thought of it as an extra at Yuletide, a way of keeping those we didn't see all that often up to date and also a way to wish those whom we held in esteem a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

The letter became a kind of combined message: what's been going on, what we'd like to happen in the new year and a little about what Christmas means to us.

It was easy to write a Christmas letter in those days. The kids were growing up; we were acquiring things, a car, a house, a place in the mountains. After that came graduations, engagements and other milestones. Year after year the letters came to follow a kind of ritual. It's a ritual which unfortunately I've seen parodied:

Well, nothing much happened this year, Johnny broke his arm, Aunt Maisie died, the cat had kittens, we traveled to Milpitas and back ... and so on.

I don't think our letters were quite that bad, but as the years went on, I tended to find they were saying much the same things.

The kids had grown up; their kids hadn't yet; we had stopped acquiring things and were trying to get rid of them; some friends were dying off, and we regretted that.

So I switched from "news" to inspirational messages: the true meaning of Christmas, the inspiration of the end of a year and the beginning of a new one.

I suppose some of them sounded a little portentous. Someone at least told me they sounded like little sermons and one of my relatives told me to stop sending them to him. (He was always a scrooge, I thought, anyway.)

Part of the problem also was that the world didn't seem to get any better. Indeed, it seemed to get worse.

We weathered Vietnam and then there was the first gulf war. Bill Clinton and Monica came and went. Then we suffered 9-11 and the Iraq war.

It got harder to find an inspirational message. The world wasn't all that inspirational, I guess.

Then this November rolled around and I found near its end that the same old problem loomed before me: how to say something nice about 2005 and how to look forward to something in 2006 that might give cheer to friends and family.

And so I fell back on Charles Dickens. Dickens wrote (among other things) "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times ... "

And it has been.

The worst of the times has been the never-ending war and the enmity that the rest of the world harbors for us. You could add a lot more to this side of the worst of things, everything from the Forty-Niners current season to demise of the daily newspaper. In fact, you could write a lot of Christmas letters with a lot of bad news in them.

On the other hand, it is possible to find some inspiration in a smaller universe, the one we all inhabit with our families. In that microcosm, which is, after all, the world in which we spend most of our time, things are pretty good.

This year we were blessed with our first great-grandson, a husky young guy named Hunter. This year the twins, who started life under extremely precarious conditions (one weighed less than two pounds, the other less than four) turned three and so far as we can tell are fine, healthy young active men-to-be.

One of our granddaughters graduated from college and announced she is going to married in July to a very nice young man who graduated from the same college last year.

We realized somewhat to our surprise that we have been married for 52 years, a matter of no small consequence. We have minor ailments, but so far no major ones. We lost only a few close friends. We've enjoyed the friendship of those that are left.

That was the "best" side of things

So, I guess, it is partly a matter of perspective. You can look at the bigger picture and see darkness or you can examine the smaller one and see a lot of light.

I hope you can do the same thing, that the year that's coming to an end has thrown some light into your life.

And with that I wish you and all of yours a Merry Christmas.

And I end my 2005 Christmas letter.