Holiday Cards and Letters

Ok, I said that I was going to go to sleep, but I couldn’t do so without sharing one more thing. Here at the shack we have been receiving a very large number of holiday cards and a sizeable number of letters with them.

The letters are the standard fare of here is what happened to us in the last year and some specific details about the individuals in them. I thought about writing one of those letters and found chunks of it to be depressing.

“Well the year started off on an odd note as my grandmother had a number of heart problems and they told us to prepare for the end. Just five months after my other grandmother died we held our breaths and waited. Thankfully she didn’t and we are all very grateful.

A relatively short time later during a routine pregnancy checkup we found out that we tested positive for a birth defect, probably Downs Syndrome but possibly Spinal Bifida. We took an amnio and waited breathlessly for 10 days to find out it was a false positive.

About a month later we sister gave birth to her third child and then my father became ill almost died in the hospital from infection, had a heart attack and then later underwent a triple bypass. A two week trip to New Jersey became a 4.5 month saga.

Midway through this my sister had emergency surgery to remove her gall bladder, we we blessed with the birth of my daughter and had a half dozen other minor issues to deal with.

Now we are all back home and everyone is doing well and we are counting are blessings”

Instead of writing a letter like that I think that it would be far more interesting to just make something up.

“2004 was an uneventful year. Jack was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, climbed the K2, swam with the dolphins in Hawaii, ran the Ironman, developed two new orthopedic devices called the ‘monkey sway’ and the ‘baboon bit’ and was able to provide two feature films with the score for their soundtracks.

The children were recognized as prodigies and frankly there are so many good things going on we’ll stop lisiting them because it would just embarrass you.”

See, 30 seconds of silliness. I don’t care if you are laughing, because I am just sitting here giggling. Which just proves that fatigue is the best drug.

Lailah tov from Los Angeles.