Christmas 2015
Dear Family and Friends,
Due to the busy holiday season and
other events, and after much thought, anxiety, and consternation, our family
has decided to cancel our Christmas letter this year.
John has little enough time to read
all his Facebook page and watch the Eagles lose, let alone write a Christmas
letter. And then there is all that time he spends being pastorly, grading
papers for his Messiah College students, and counseling at Grace Like a River,
so he definitely does not have time.
Andrew, a junior at Asbury
University, is finding his way as an excellent screen writer but time and
motivation to write a Christmas letter? Probably not. All of his free time is
spent either dreaming up the next film he’s going to create or working on said
film. And his summer was filled with an internship in NYC and a quick trip to
Kentucky to accept a student Emmy for his documentary, Hedgehog USA.
Jesse went off to Eastern University
this fall as a freshman studying middle education with an emphasis in science
and math. He’s having way too much fun to write our Christmas letter. Being
elected to student council, playing intramural soccer on his team the Tight-ans,
and drawing pictures with the ink sac from a squid in biology class are keeping
him too busy to write our annual letter.
Mariana, a senior at Mechanicsburg
Area Senior High, is feeling stressed about college auditions for the musical
theater departments of various colleges, mostly in the NYC area. She’s been
flying high since playing Peter Pan in her high school’s spring musical last
year and then when she was chosen as one of only twelve students for a summer
musical theater intensive at Wagner University (her first choice for college)
and I don’t think she’ll come down long enough to get something written.
Shoun is a freshman at MASH. He was
too busy this summer to get a head start on our Christmas card. While he could
have been writing he was hard at work at a nearby farm. He definitely learned
the value of hard work (and a great paycheck) but knows that he doesn’t want to
go into farming for a living. And now that he joined the school’s swim team,
well, he just can’t write even a single paragraph.
Isaac is also a freshman at MASH. He
could have written our letter for us if he didn’t spend so much time with his
viola instead. He enjoyed music camp at Messiah College this summer, plays in
their orchestra during the school year, made 2nd chair at County
Orchestra, and auditioned for and is heading to District Orchestra. There’s
always orchestra at school and King’s Strings concerts, too.
Eden loves to write so we thought
maybe she could do the honors this year but instead she decided to go off and
go to real school for 5th grade. She is at a charter school in
Harrisburg which is just right for her; lots of field trips, hands-on learning,
and small group instruction. She writes a lot of stories and enjoys her writing
assignments in history but didn’t want to write our Christmas letter.
HopeAnne, 9, is the lone homeschool
representative this year so I could have forced her to write our letter but
that didn’t seem fair. Besides, she spends all of her time running and wouldn’t
really enjoy stopping to write. Healthy Kids Running Series keeps her running
each fall and spring (where she’s come in 1st place each season this
year) and Girls on the Run was another outlet this fall which culminated in a
5K around Hershey Park where she came in 15th out of 428 girls ages
10 and under.
Victor, who will be 3 in April, would
probably love to write the Christmas letter, because it would mean he could
pound on the keyboard, and he loves pounding on everything and with
everything. He is extremely verbal so it would be worth a shot except
that he’s too busy spending all of his time getting in trouble. If it can
be climbed on or over, he’s there. If it involves water, he’s soaking wet.
And as for me, well, I love to write
but since writing so much for The King
Zoo and Funny Farm blog, I didn’t know what else to put into a Christmas
letter. And if I do find any spare time I try to fill it with sewing or reading
or planning for the Bible study I lead at church. And of course there are all
the usual jobs for a family of ten (eleven if you count the 16 year old foster
child we had for a few months this year) - laundry, cleaning, cooking, taxiing,
you get the picture.
So there you have it, the reasons we
couldn’t write a Christmas letter this year. We knew you’d all be expecting a
card so we had to at least write something to explain the absence of our annual
update. We needed to let you know that even though we would love to tell you
about our lives, about how grateful we are for all God’s blessings and lessons
of the year, and how we’d love to wish you a Merry Christmas, we just didn’t
have time this year. Perhaps next year…
Love,
Cindy for all of us
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