The Christmas Letter, part 1

     I hate to say that I have run out of ideas for my yearly Christmas blog series, but I have spent the last week or so trying to come up with a new theme for this year.

 I asked my family, and over the weekend, while I was going through last year’s Christmas cards (yes, last year’s. I thought I’d already gone through them and only saved certain ones, but apparently, they were all there), I mentioned the number of letters people had written. You know, the “Christmas Letter”, which I am guilty of writing as well, where the writer tells you all about the year they had. My daughter thought I should blog about the “Christmas Letter”. But if I continue posting three times a week, that is seven posts between now and Christmas (not counting the Sunday posts). And there is clearly not enough that could be said about the “Christmas Letter” to take up that much time and space.

 Sometimes I am pretty dense though.

 I mean, as I was paging through other people’s letters, I even asked myself if I was going to send out the “Christmas Letter” with my Christmas cards again this year. (Every single year I fall into a quandary about whether or not to bore family and friends with it, as well as spend the time composing it.)

 And then, duh, it hit me. This will be my Christmas letter to you, over the next three weeks. Accept my apologies ahead of time if I bore you. And also, if you don’t read my blog, I guess you won’t know how my year went.

 Here’s a spoiler alert: it was a pretty rough year. But we got through it and I can look back now and remember the bright spots. So hold onto your hats and come back on Friday to hear how our year began.

 Above is our grill on the deck from February 23 and below is the same grill this past weekend. 

I'm going to have to spend some time focusing on the nice three weeks of weather we had this past year. 

 To be continued . . .