266. Christmas Letter Parody

January 6, 2011

Q: Many years ago the Lampoon published a parody of a Christmas letter which is the best thing of it’s kind that I’ve ever seen. This was during a time when many people enclosed a letter in their Christmas card telling the reader what a great year they and their kids and other family members had – in short, it was all about bragging about how well they were all doing. Letters of this kind were often over the top and I, for one, got sick of this kind of “showing off”. The Lampoon did a magnificient job of parodying this kind of thing and I have been forever grateful for the job they did.

A: National Lampoon doesn’t appear to have run anything like that, but it may have been in Mad. See the Comments link for more about this.

Comments

This sounds more like a MAD magazine-type article to me, and, in fact, MAD did something like it in the January 1977 issue. The piece starts with a parody of a letter from a typical family, then imagines versions from some atypical ones: a Mafia family, a family from Harlem, a Beverly Hills show-biz family, and a career Army officer's family.

—Nate Lampe

March 16, 2012 2:57 am

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