2008 Christmas Letter

This may be one of my favorites. What better fodder for a Christmas letter than the Federal TARP legislation. It was a no-brainer. I remember being curious about the bill (and not in a Christmas letter kind of way but in a government is being absurd kind of way) so I downloaded it. But when I read one particular line on the first page (“Ordered to lie on the table and to be printed”), I knew I could not possibly leave this document alone. Although I changed many sections of the document to suite my purpose, I left that one alone. It didn’t need my help.

I transformed the legislation into a government bailout of the Christmas letter writers industry. It is 95 pages long and I read every stinking page…which is way more than most politicians can say. I did not change every page.

I started out with significant changes in the first oh…I’d say ten pages or so. Then I would skip a few and throw something in wherever I saw something that caught my eye. I left it up to the victim to decide if they were going to read every page for fear of missing something extra clever or give up after the first ten pages and call it a day.

I also like the introductory letter (if I may be so bold). If you magnify the first page of the PDF document to about 400% you will see the small logo I used in the lower left corner shows my document is certified by the “Rainforest Alliance.” If you are ever looking for random logos to use in your document for nefarious purposes, peruse government websites, they have a lot of them.

I went all out that year. I had it professionally printed in color and bound in a spiral comb with clear plastic covers. It was probably one of the most expensive Christmas letters in the collection. The guy at Kinko’s looked at me a little funny when I picked them up.

(click on an image to magnify)

Click here for a PDF version