Christmas Letter, 2011

Last December, some may recall, I chose to put our annual Christmas letter online. This decision was met with both scorn and contempt. A number of folks, apparently, had become accustomed to the old-timey feel of the traditional Christmas letter—paper in hand, sitting next to their gas fire places while reading the letter by halogen bulb—and they informed me of their disappointment via email, texting and various social media outlets. I felt bad about this. However, the fact still remains: if I didn’t take the time to mail out dozens of Christmas letters before a crying little baby moved into bed with me, what makes anyone think I would do it now?

Speaking of babies, those of you who are regular readers (all three of you) have probably noticed that there has been quite a bit less to read regularly. This is almost entirely my son’s fault. As mentioned, he is a baby, and, like most babies, he requires an absurd amount of attention. The remaining blame lies squarely on the shoulders of my daughter. She is a toddler, and, like most toddlers, she insists we play “unicorns and ponies and horsies” with her nearly every waking moment of the day. What does the “unicorn and ponies and horsies” game consist of? It consists of her telling us that whatever it is that we are doing at that moment is terribly wrong and needs to stop. It is exhausting.

Needless to say, we love every minute of them. How can we not? They’re great; a true blessing. They’re healthy, good-natured, and, like the “Get out of Jail Free” cards on the Monopoly game, they consistently rescue us from doing things we don’t want to do.

For example, if we are invited to a social function we’d rather not attend, we might play the Toddler Card. “Yeah, I can’t, my daughter is, well, she’s sick. . . and we’d better not take her out.” Or, if an enthusiastic passerby asks us about some landscaping issues, we might put down the Baby Card. “I know, I know, those weeds, really, those weeds just look terrible, such an eyesore, I know. Maybe next year, when the baby’s a little older.”

Perhaps one of us has been “nominated” to fulfill a dull and time-consuming extra assignment at work. Then we’d probably go all out and hit them with the Tiny Young Children Card, which is particularly useful if the person requesting our services can recall their own parenting-of-young-children days. “Man, I really wish I could serve on that committee, you know, it’s really important and I’m honored I was drafted, but with two small kids at home, I just really don’t think I could give it the attention it deserves.”

The fact is, I’m not at all ashamed to admit that we’ve used both our children numerous times this year to get us out of situations in which we’d be expected to wear uncomfortable pants. As the old saying goes, “Hey, they’re only young once. Enjoy every moment with them. Especially if they keep you from pulling weeds.”

Unfortunately, neither one of our kids were able to keep us from going to work five days a week to do our part in dismantling civilization. As most of you know, we are still public school teachers, and, as has been reiterated numerous times in the last couple of years, school teachers are lazy, greedy, and stupid. Not only do we make an absurd amount of money over the course of nine months not teaching anybody anything ever, upon retiring we don’t even have the common decency to immediately die.

This selfishness has basically caused all of our society’s economic problems, and, thus, to punish us for this mess, a few key pieces of legislation have either been put into place or soon will be. Fortunately, these laws should adequately solve our state’s enormous budget woes in less than half a century, or whenever our next governor gets out of prison, whichever comes first.

On a much lighter note, most of my tomato plants died this year before I wanted them to. This was my first actual garden and it consisted of four tomato plants, four green pepper plants and four jalapeño pepper plants, which is about four more jalapeño plants than I needed. The tomato plants did quite well for about three weeks in early summer, a part of my life I’ve since dubbed “My Red Delicious June.” Then it became quite hot and dry, and they just kind of stopped doing anything except mocking me from my kitchen window. Most importantly, though, I’ve learned some valuable lessons which I will forget next spring when I try again.

Another project we tried out this year had much more satisfying results, at least for me, and that was homemade beer making. A wide variety of beer-making kits exist, from complicated, multi-step, rather expensive units that make really, really delicious beer, all the way down to what I have in my basement. My beer-making kit is the Hamburger Helper of the industry, which is exactly what I need with two small children and a wife who doesn’t like beer that much anyway. Some may ask, “Aren’t you setting a bad example for your children, brewing alcohol in your own home?” The answer to that is “No, don’t be silly. Beer is a food. Monks brew beer.” If anything, I am setting a great example because I am teaching them to be resourceful and provide for themselves. Instead of buying the stuff in a store, I order everything needed online and wait for it to be delivered to my doorstep via Federal Express . Also, if society ever collapses, who do you think people will run to when they need to make quick and easy weapons out of broken glass bottles? Basically I’m a survivalist without the cache of military-grade firearms.

In closing, 2011 was pretty cool. The Cardinals earned their eleventh World Series; Blagojevich earned his fourteen years in prison. And the rest of us? Well, we survived. We survived the ice storm, the tornado storms, and the BS storm from Washington. (Remember how they almost shut down the federal government this summer and made us all look like incredible jerks, and then pretended that they could solve the problem by having a secret committee, which made us look like jerks again? Ah, the memories. I’m so glad they got all that fixed.) Also, it’s important to consider that this might be our penultimate letter, what with the Mayan calendar ending next December and what not. With that in mind, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to copy, paste it, and print it out. Take some time to read it by the fire. In fact, to make the experience even more down to earth, you could put it into a bright red Christmas envelope and mail it to yourself. After all, the post office could really use some help. Merry Christmas.