Tis the seaon for those horribly boring Christmas form letter sent to you by your relatives. They will tell you who died, who didn't and who should have. You'll get a saccrine dose of how fabulous their children are doing in school right down to how many puppies their prize chihuahua had. Most of us stop reading about paragraph two and toss it in the card basket.

If you want to really catch someones's eye when sending out the requisite Christmas letter, write it in a style unlike any you've ever received. Imagine that you were Tony Soprano. Do you think he'd gush on about the church bake sale? Marilyn Monroe would have a style too and it wouldn't look like Marilyn Manson's yearly letter. The point here is to inject something worth reading into this 8.5x11 sheet other than the same old thing.

I once received a newsy little card from my dentist. He said that Rosie his wife was getting out of jail on December 24th. His kids were in boot cap learning how to get their anger issues under control. The dog was hauled off to the pound so they could retrieve someone's index finger he'd swallowed - inadvertantly. After I went through the letter three times with tears of mirth streaming down my face I got on the phone and read it to several more people who didn't even know my dentist and his really quite lovely family. His bizarre sense of humor caught me unaware and I've remembered it to this day.

On the other hand, one of my former publishers wrote three endless pages about his wife and children. Never were there such paragons of virtue, so talented, so photogenic, nor so gifted. In fact, they were an average family with a journalist for a father. While I don't mind gilding the lily on occasion, the holiday letter isn't supposed to be your one platform for family bragging ad nausium.

If you must write that holiday letter, try to personalize it. Write "Dear Aunt Jane" and then mention something you know means something to her. The body can be standard - you moved, your job was downsized, you became grandparents, etc. The wrapup needs to go back to personal. If you and Aunt Jane share spiritual beliefs, it's the perfect paragraph in which to do so. If you and Aunt Jane are drinking buddies, wish her a case of Bud and half a dozen bottles of

Boones Farm. You get the point, it's personal. In this day and age of computers, hand written letters have gone the way of typewriters and dinosaurs. This is what makes it so easy to personalize. You simply cut and paste.

Whatever you do in the end, I might also suggest you haul out all of the other form holiday letters you've saved over the years. If you find one you really think is worth reading, there's your pattern. But if most of them begin to blend one into the other, maybe you'll see why it takes some clever content to pull this off. In the end, if you are still in dispair over what to say without putting your relatives into a catatonic state, just google holiday letters. You know someone out there has prewritten exactly what you wanted to say.