The Christmas Letter I Will Never Send

One of the things I used to do when the kids were smaller and I was traveling to more exotic locations (like Cape Town, South Africa and Zagreb, Croatia) was summarize the highlights of our year, insert a few cute photos and mail it off to a few (not everyone) folks on our Christmas card lists.

This year I decided: let's get real. Crap happens - and no one mentions the bad stuff.
We've had a particularly rough year in many ways.. For example this is the first time ever we've maxed out our medical plan out-of-pocket costs (I think it was $8,000 or so?) for the entire family. On the one hand, I'm kinda getting used to these $0 co-pays for all our medications at the pharmacy and not paying any co-pays when we visit doctors, even specialists!
It'll be a bit of a bummer when January rolls around and we go back to paying the usual amounts..but then again, one would hope we all have better health next year.

Anyways, partially joking I wrote up a "Christmas Family Newsletter" using a typical MS Word provided Christmas Template. I included pictures and updates on each member of the family - what we've been up to this year and I.WAS.REAL. I put in both the good and the bad.

I showed Jeff - and his instantaneous reaction after reading it was: Burn it.

Yep, 2014 has been an interesting year... and no, I won't be sending out any Christmas Letters. Just smiling photos that show we survived this eventful year.