Holiday Letters Editing and Proofreading Services

The card says wishing you a wonderful holiday season and a very happy new year, from all of us. It goes to the neighbour, the old colleague, the friend whose mother died in March, and the couple who are separating quietly and have not told most of the people on this list yet. The same seventeen words reach all of them, and for at least two of the people opening it, the season is not what the card assumes it is.

We edit what people write for seasonal and year-end cards — holiday and season's greetings cards, notes added to a printed card, cards sent to a mixed list of friends, family, neighbours and colleagues, cards written to someone known to be grieving or unwell that year, business and client greetings sent by a sole trader, and the short personal line added beneath a standard printed message. Our editors work on the twelve words that have to be right because there is no room for more.

The personal line is what turns a card into something rather than a formality with a stamp on it, and its failure is a greeting so generic it could be signed by a stranger. Wishing you all the best is not a message; it is the absence of one. We work through these so the line references something true and specific to that recipient — a visit, a call, a shared joke from the summer — since a card that could be sent to anyone on the list usually is; so cards to someone who has had a hard year are not written in the same cheerful register as the rest of the batch, given that a relentlessly festive card to someone recently bereaved reads as not having noticed; so the wording avoids assuming a happy, gathered, unchanged household, because family composition changes and a card addressed to a couple who have separated, or naming a job someone has lost, causes a small, needless hurt; so a card to someone alone is not written to sound like pity, as warmth and pity use very different words for the same sentiment; so the tone matches the actual relationship rather than the most generic version of it, since a card to a close friend written in the same words as one to a distant colleague flattens both; and so it is short, because twelve honest words beat forty generic ones. Cards written this way get kept on the mantelpiece past January.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including who is on your list and any personal circumstances you mention. We are editors rather than counsellors, and we offer no view on your relationships or what should be said to anyone on your list. What we can do is help each line sound like it was actually written for the person opening it.