Eric’s Holiday Letter, December 2021

Dear friends and family,

What a year. I feel like I fell out of the lucky tree, hit every branch on the way down, and ended up in a pool of cash and Sour Patch Kids. After my recent success writing a local American holiday letter, I was invited this year to edit an English Premier League letter in London called KFC Twickenham. I originally assumed, as you probably did, that KFC stood for Kentucky Fried Chicken, but it doesn’t. It stands for Keepers of Festive Christmas letters, which, now that I think about it, makes more sense.

I started the year leading the staff remotely via Zoom, but over the summer we started a hybrid work plan. I would work from home in Burbank, California, on Mondays and Wednesdays and commute to London, England, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I always used to complain about my commute here in Los Angeles, but, let me tell you, commuting from Los Angeles to London is somehow even worse! I’m glad the letter-writing season is over.

It was not always smooth sailing. When I first started editing the letter, my writers did not immediately accept me. They complained that I used Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary instead of the Oxford English Dictionary and said I didn’t belong there. But I gradually won them over with my relentless positivity. And cookies. I handed out cookies. Honestly, I just bought shortbread cookies at Marks & Spencer and repackaged them. They were perfectly fine. But, for some reason, people went crazy for them, shoveling them into their mouths like they hadn’t eaten anything in a month. I don’t know what that was about.

It took more than relentless positivity and cookies, though, to win them over. It also took charm. This mainly involved insulting their tea. The British love that. When I was asked “how do you take your tea?” I would say, “Well, I usually take it right over to the sink and pour it down the drain because tea is horrible garbage water.” Charm.

I had several challenges to overcome. My star writer, Jimmy Torte, refused to share writing credit with the rest of the team. The gruff but loveable copy editor, Ray York, was a longtime veteran of holiday letters, but he was having a little trouble keeping up with the younger writers. His elbows just weren’t up to the grueling writing schedule anymore. My newest recruit, Tony Velas, seemed like a breath of fresh air, with his constant refrain of “Metaphors are life!” But then he suffered from a severe case of writer’s block known as the yaps. And, as if that weren’t enough, I had to find a new sponsor for my letter, because my previous sponsor, Exoskeleton Oil, was polluting the ocean. Finding the right sponsor meant attending a lot of branding meetings. I always feel so bad for the cows, but you have to do it, otherwise they get lost.

I don’t blame my writers or the fans for doubting me. There really are differences between holiday letters in the US and UK. For example, in the US you put a holiday letter in an envelope, but in the UK you put it in the boot. In the US you write holiday letters in an office, but in the UK they are written in a lift. And lifts can be different sizes! Letters in the US always end in a win or a loss, but in the UK a letter can also end in a tie! I kept forgetting that! But the most important thing to know is that in the UK the Premier League letters don’t necessarily stay in the Premier League. If the letter isn’t good enough, it can be relegated to a less significant holiday. Instead of writing for Christmas, you might get stuck writing a Summer Bank Holiday letter. It’s humiliating.

And that brings me to the biggest shocker of the holiday season. It turns out my boss, Susanna, didn’t hire me because she thought I was the best editor. She hired me because she thought I would fail and the letter would suffer relegation. I know, right? Who would intentionally sabotage a holiday letter? Well, it turns out this holiday letter was the only thing her former business partner ever cared about and she wanted to destroy it in an act of revenge. She set up a newspaper interview for me, knowing that I would make a fool of myself. I fell for her plan and agreed to the interview. So I met the reporter at a restaurant and ordered the wrong thing, as I always do. But a funny thing happened. The reporter, Trevor Grims of The Independent, ended up writing a positive piece about me:

TREVOR GRIMS: “Trevor Grims, The Independent.”

Yes, we know. I just said that.

TREVOR GRIMS: “Right. Sorry. Whatever you think of Eric as a writer of holiday letters, I assure you the truth is harder to swallow. And swallow you must, because Eric is out there either bravely or stupidly writing this letter. That’s for you to decide. And yes, he’s in over his head. He started writing this letter and now has no idea how to end it. But if the Eric way is wrong, it’s hard to imagine being right. In a letter that’s supposed to be about the holidays, Eric makes everything about himself. His style is never subtle. It hits you over the head. Whether that means referencing twelve hours of television that may mean nothing to many people or eating food so spicy it’s sure to wreak massive havoc on his intestinal system. And though I believe this letter will be a disaster, I can’t help but root for him.”

OK, well, the part about the spicy food was maybe a little more detail than we needed, but other than that, I think those kind words were just what we needed to get through this letter. Writing this letter this year has been a real rollercoaster. After a bad start to the year and losing the Valentine’s Day letter to Crystal Palace, things looked like they were going well in the spring, when we wrote a better Easter letter than Everton for the first time in 60 years. By summer, though, we weren’t making as much progress as we’d hoped, with a string of ties so long that it threatened to tie the record for the most ties, which is currently a tie. Then, at the end of the season, just when we thought our defenses were strong enough to save us from relegation, we were hit with a series of surprise trick plays, including the Midnight Hyperbole, Loki’s Euphemism, and the Omicron Variant. But we aren’t going to give up. We have work to do. Next year we’re going to come back from relegation, get promoted back to the Premier League, and then we’re going to win the whole darn thing!

TONY VELAS: “Metaphors are life!”

That’s right, Tony! It’s good to have you back! In the letter industry, the term “bend it” means to put a twist on the story, as in “bend it like O. Henry.” So I’m going to end with this:

You know what the happiest animal on earth is? It’s a goldfish. You know why? Ten second memory. When a goldfish experiences disappointment, it immediately forgets about it. And doesn’t learn anything. And then eats so much it explodes. Don’t be a goldfish. But do have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Love,

Eric