christmas card hall of fame....

ok, so.....i finished baking 4 kinds of cookies just in time yesterday to place an assortment in a tin to give to ernst's brother james and his wife barb as they arrived......i have plenty to fill more tins, but i digress.....i have a sequence in mind of how my christmas preparations must go......and the cookies fell before the evergreen arch over the door and the christmas letter....even the cookies had to wait til the eku tests were graded and the final grades tallied and posted on-line.....and so i have started the christmas letter, and emailed the draft to those who are mentioned there-in...the tradition of letter-review stems from the year my mother announced in the family letter that i had miscarried twins.....which was a possibility, but had not been determined and was frankly nobody's business outside my own circle of friends.....after that i have always gotten a call asking me what is allowable for all to know, and what we'd rather not disclose.....in fact, it has become a joke between my brother and i...the notion that some things are to be kept to ourselves lest they be sent out in letter form to everybody our parents ever met........the christmas letter tradition goes back to my childhood, when my dad spent considerable time penning our family missive, which listed in great detail our travels for the year...now that my own family sends cards a letter makes a lot of sense, especially for folks we don't see often and who we don't generally hear from until we get their letters.....no idea how to casually mention my record-breaking two trips to france in a single year without it sounding like bragging.....