Kids These Days:

You’ve gotten one before. You’ve probably received several of them over the years, usually from the same family or families.

This is the time of year when those families feel compelled to update you on everything that has happened in their lives during the past 12 months. It’s all there: the kids, the pets and the things you don’t really want to know, such as the results of someone’s prostate surgery.

Most of the time, you groan when the letter arrives, and groan even louder when you read it.

I used to groan, too. I used to read these year-end letters and think of them as fairy tales.

I stopped groaning a few years ago when I considered whether the communications tools we have today are not keeping us more in touch, but keeping us apart.

Most of the time, those communications are not conversations or letters, they are messages, short messages that act as a substitute for meaningful dialogue. Those messages are the junk food of our relationships. What our communications require today are more full meals, more sit-down dinners.

Years ago, I used to write letters, sometimes long letters. I had only plain paper and plain envelopes, but the letter would be written, I’d put a stamp on it, mail it, and a couple of days later, a far-off friend or relative would receive it.

No more. Now, we communicate on the fly.

Today, we sandwich what passes for meaningful communication between the many other things we have to do each day.

I am not the first to lament the loss of the long letter or the lengthy conversation, but I’ll bet I’m one of the few who looks forward to those year-end family letters each December.

Mark Berman has been my friend for 39 years. Berman lives about 30 minutes away, but we see each other only during our quarterly poker games at the house of a mutual friend. In between, we are messaging each other.

Each year, Berman and his wife, Rose Mary, compose a letter offering the year’s family highlights. It is never more than a page and is accompanied by a family photo.

This year, friends and family learned that one of the three Berman children is attending USC, which has caused some good-natured rivalry in the home because Mark and Rose Mary Berman are UCLA alumni.

As the letter states, they are a “House Divided.”

The three Berman children are all doing well, which is to be expected from parents whose focus, despite busy, intense professional careers, has always been on their family.

There were a couple of deaths this year. Mark’s father died, as did Rose Mary’s Aunt Sally.

Overall, the Berman family is doing very well.

I’ve considered a similar letter over the years but always stopped because I didn’t think anyone would want to read about our lives. The highlights this year would have been that our two automobiles, a combined 15 years old, are still running.

No, that’s not true, we are doing well and have much to be thankful for. I just don’t know that anyone else would want to read about it — an odd comment from someone who writes for a living.

I do enjoy the Berman letter each year, not just because Mark Berman is a good friend, but because the letter really does make up for the times when we lived a bike ride away and knew everything about each other.

So if you groan when you get one of these family letters, think about the fact that someone sat in front of a computer to compose it, had to think about what to write, printed it, stuffed it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and mailed it to you, and that you are one of the lucky few deserving of this lost art.

It’s something that e-mail will never replace.

STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and a freelance writer. Send story ideas to dailypilot@latimes.com .