As this is the month of my birthday, and this is one of my favourite birthday stories, I thought I would share this, today, on the eve. I came across this story in one of the Chicken Soup collections and I always loved it. Loving, as you know I do, letters...can you imagine what it would have been like to open the box at 21 and read ALL these letters?
Shortly after my daughter Juli-Ann was born, I started a loving tradition that I know others (with whom I have subsequently shared this special plan) have also started. I tell you the idea here both to open your heart with the warmth of my story and also to encourage you to start this tradition within your own family.
Every year, on her birthday, I write an Annual Letter to my daughter. I fill it with funny anecdotes that happened to her that year, hardships or joys, issues that are important in my life or hers, world events, my predictions for the future, miscellaneous thoughts, etc. I add to the letter photographs, presents, report cards and many other types of mementoes that would certainly have otherwise disappeared as the years passed.
I keep a folder in my desk drawer in which, all year long, I place things that I want to include in the envelope containing her next Annual Letter. Every week, I make short notes of what I can think of from the week's events that I will want to recall later in the year to write in her Annual Letter. When her birthday approaches, I take out that folder and find it overflowing with ideas, thoughts, poems, cards, treasures, stories, incidents and memories of all sorts -- many of which I had already forgotten -- and which I then eagerly transcribe into that year's Annual Letter.
Once the letter is written and all the treasures inserted into the envelope, I seal it. It then becomes that year's "Annual Letter". On the envelope I always write "Letter to Juli-Ann from her Daddy on the occasion of her nth birthday -- to be opened when she is 21 years old."
It is a time capsule of love from every different year of her life to her as an adult. It is a gift of loving memories from one generation to the next. It is a permanent record of her life, written as she was actually living it.
Our tradition is that I show her the sealed envelope, with the proclamation written on it that she may read it when she is 21. Then I take her to the bank, open the safe deposit box, and tenderly place that year's Annual Letter on the growing pile of its predecessors. She sometimes takes them all out to look at them and feel them. She sometimes asks me about their contents and I refuse to tell her what is inside.
In recent years, Juli-Ann has given me some of her special childhood treasures, which she is growing too old for but which she does not want to lose. And she asks me to include them in her Annual Letter so she will always have them.
That tradition of writing her Annual Letters is now one of my most sacred duties as a dad. As as Juli-Ann grows older, I can see it is a growing and special part of her life, too.
One day we were sitting with friends musing about what we will be doing in the future. I cannot recall the exact words spoken, but it went something like this: I jokingly told Juli-Ann that on her 61st birthday she would be playing with her grandchildren. Then, I whimsically invented that on her 31st birthday she will be driving her own kids to hockey practice. Getting into the groove of this funny game and encouraged by Juli-Ann's evident enjoyment of my fantasies, I continued. On your 21st birthday, you will be graduating from university.
"No, she interjected. "I will be too busy reading."
One of my deepest desires is to be alive and to enjoy that wonderful time in the future when the time capsules are opened and the accumulated mountains of love come tumbling out of the past, back into my adult daughter's life.
Raymond L. Aaron
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