2003 Christmas Letter

I continued the theme of injecting personal events into the letters. Our minivan was stolen while Chris and I were watching the latest Matrix movie at a local theater (ironically the same theater of the Aurora mass shootings of last year). Much of the account of discovering the car being stolen and the eventual recovery from the impound lot was as it happened. The pictures of the car and the impound ticket are real. We were still finding bits of broken glass in the car years after. Then there was other stupid stuff…Hussein was captured and there was Martha Stewart’s scandal. I used them all.

I started the letter without any real aim or goal in mind. The end result was a meandering and semi-convoluted story that drifted from reality to fictitious and back again a number of times (i.e. just like all the other letters). In addition to the interesting storyline, the letter demonstrated my evolving Photoshopping skills. I was especially proud of my MORON acronym. How many opportunities does one get to use the words “ostentatious”, “rhetorical” and “oratory” all at the same time?

The letter was produced on a mini-CD. I chose the mini-CD because they were cute and unusual. It was also cheaper to make and ship a PDF file versus printing in full color and mailing (I had gotten rid of my color printer a year earlier). The CD case artwork with the instructions is included here at no additional cost to you or your family. I always included instructions as such things as viewing documents from an optical disk always proved challenging for the victims.

(click on an image to enlarge)

Click here for PDF version