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A Christmas Letter
Dear readers:
This is my last column of 2017, and you’re going to be treated to my version of a Christmas Letter. If you know me, and let’s face it some of you do, you know how I feel about Christmas Letters. I don’t send anything, to anyone, printed on festive paper hidden in the folds of a Christmas card. A Christmas Letter means I’d have to carefully document my past year so I could embellish and regurgitate it to you. We’ve received Christmas Letters over the years, usually from people we hadn’t seen since college, telling us about their exciting trips, their show-stopping pets and their genius children. As the Christmas Letters start trickling in, LOML and I wonder if we should put one together—our letter would have to be from our sketchy, collective memories. On Friday we received our first Christmas letter of 2017(more a note) from a dear friend. We’ve known her for 45 years. So, why not a letter? A Christmas Letter. So, here it goes.
LOML and I were enjoying the life of empty-nesters until September of this year when we found ourselves opening our home to our oldest son and his family while they look for their own home in the Quinte area. Just to be clear, our son, his spouse and their daughter are now helping us remember what it’s like to have more than two people rambling around in the house. Having a nine-year-old granddaughter in the house is pretty interesting and very delightful. The house hunt, for them, continues. On December 13, our youngest daughter joined the fun at the funny farm, I mean, the family home. Now we are six. Thank goodness we bought this house because it has two bathrooms and four bedrooms. Youngest child is a cook extraordinaire, so we’ve got lots of good food going on while she settles in for her new adventures. Youngest son, his fiancée and her daughter haven’t moved in, although they have joked about it. They will be joining the fun during the holidays, but only temporarily (we think). Oldest child and her husband and their boys will be avoiding the chaos and hiding out in Burlington until the snow disappears from the roads.
So, wasn’t 2017 a party? Well, it was for LOML’s uncle in Espanola. Uncle Fred celebrated his one hundredth birthday with a big piece of chocolate cake, a rather large glass of wine and about 200 of his friends and family. We loved the eight-hour drive to his party. Speaking of eight hours, we visited my brother and his wife in the UK. It was our first trip, to the UK and we wonder, now, why we waited so long. Wait a second, it was a wonderful trip, but it wouldn’t have happened without them saying their one-bedroom flat had room for two more people to sleep on an airbed in their dining room. When you couple free accommodation with a deal on airfare how can you say “no”? Four adults and only one bathroom should have been a problem, but we’d all been raised in one-bathroom homes, so it was “ham and cheesy”. On a bright note, we had 15 days of great food, great fun, great museums, great beer and the best weather London has had in the spring in many years. I guess we were their little ray of sunshine. It seems the London family is now enjoying Canadian-style winter weather. Now that our “out west kids” are here in Ontario, we won’t have to make those trips anymore and we can afford to head back to London in 2018.
By this time next week we’ll have three additional children staying here. Nine people, four bedrooms, two bathrooms and one more vehicle in the driveway. We can do this with a little help from Christmas cookies and Scotch and our County friends cheering us along. Isn’t it wonderful how hearts and a homes can expand to accommodate more family and friends?
From our bathroom-scheduled-house to yours, we wish you Happy Holidays and a spacious New Year!
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