A Christmas letter

Dear family, friends and others:

This week, you’re going to be treated to my version of a Christmas letter. If you know me, and some of you think you do, you know how I used to feel about Christmas letters. I had no room in my cranky, cold heart for the annual brag sheet, printed on festive paper and tucked into a Christmas card. The letters usually came from people we hadn’t seen since college, or at least at a chance encounter in Toronto. Well, the Ghost of Christmas Letters Past has visited me and I’ve changed my mind about Christmas letters. Why not a Christmas letter? Who wouldn’t want to know how the guy from LOML’s third year Humanities course, in 1965, is doing. Why wouldn’t we want to know that his children and his children’s children are thriving, living the dream and on the cusp of discovering the cure for hangnails? Oh, wait a second, one of them is on parole. I’m hooked on Christmas letters.

So, wasn’t 2015 a party? It was for me and mine. This year was like the best and the worst kind of those family get-togethers you know and dread. The kind of party where almost everyone shows up, the food is good, the jokes are grand. And then? Well, and then that one person who wasn’t invited, staggers in and the skeletons hit the fan. We had a few of those days during 2015. We managed to ride out a torn rotator cuff, a deployment, a child lost in a forest, a Sjogren’s diagnosis, a staggeringly huge family get-together, a child involved in a serious car accident, a surprise trip to CFB Shiloh, the death of my 21-year-old Rolls-Can- Hardly, another massive family get-together, the migration of two family members from TO to PEC and the migration of two family members from TO to the UK. The good thing was, in all of the moving around, not one of our children moved back into the family home or even hinted that moving back home was on their minds. LOML and I look at that as the single, most appealing thing that didn’t happen this year. We like being empty-nesters. We like having family and friends visit. We love the hubbub when everyone is at home and adore the silence that washes over us when everyone goes home. Speaking of things that didn’t happen, I didn’t quit going to the gym. My commitment to fitness and to a healthy lifestyle has continued, in spite of the things that did happen this year. Things happened this year that, in the past, would have been my excuse to turn my back on my healthy lifestyle, taxi up to the saturated fats, drink too much wine, eat potato chips and cozy up to the couch.

Our girls are home for the holidays. Our Vancouver kids are doing Christmas in LaLa Land. Our Burlington kids are staying home because that’s what they do with hers and his. Between them they have four boys. Our Mississauga kids are staying in Mississauga because it’s our grand-friend’s Christmas with her DaDa, but they’ll be around on the day after Boxing Day. Our Brampton kids (part of the mixed-up family) are heading to Maryland for the holidays, having spent this past weekend with us. December 27 brings everyone back to PEC for one final, family get-together before 2016.

Best wishes to all. Party like it’s 2015. Stay safe.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca