Dear friend, coworker and/or cherished loved one,

Merry Christmas! You’ll notice we said “Christmas,” because we have joined with our friend Bill O’Reilly to defend the “Holy Day” against people who would call it a “holiday.” We won an important battle this year as we successfully got Jesus back into Wal*Mart — where he belongs.

We also spent a good portion of our summer landscaping our back yard. We built a flagstone patio and a Brazilian hardwood deck. We bought topsoil, rolled it smooth and laid sod down, and we stripped the back wall of the house down to the studs, added insulation, sheathed it with concrete fiberboard and slapped on some paint. We also installed a new pair of French doors and made a little container pond. Normally, this type of work is performed by exploited illegal immigrants. We think this is wrong, so we opted to exploit John’s brother Steve and friend Ian instead. To help give it a feel of authenticity, we picked them up in the Home Depot parking lot every morning and took them to our house in the back of a pick-up truck. The end result is that our backyard now looks much more like a backyard, and less like an abandoned county fairgrounds. Kicking the carnies out helped.

John got a new job a few months ago working for a quasi-governmental agency that conducts medical experiments — sometimes on children. (OK, he’s building Web sites for a research hospital affiliated with a state university, but didn’t the other description sound way cooler?) The people there are nice and John is adjusting to his involuntarily upgraded wardrobe quite well. Thankfully, the job does not require a tie, because then we would be forced to buy shirts custom-made to accommodate John’s freakishly huge neck. (To clarify: John’s neck is not fat. It is just big-boned, and it has a great personality.)

Patti is running Biznerds in the interim, with exploited-worker Steve handling on-site duties. We need more hosting business, so if you have a Web site that needs a home, we will be your best friends.

Here is the part of the letter where we will put a laundry list of the family members we have seen recently, in case they forgot that we saw them. In February, we flew to St. Louis to watch John’s sister Beth’s children: Kenzie, Maddie and Miles. Later, we went to Texas for our niece Emily’s wedding to some guy that I’m just going to call “Slappy.” Patti’s brother Ken, sister-in-law Lisa and nephew Evan came and visited this summer — although we suspect we were being used for our proximity to the railroad and car museums. John’s father Leon has driven up from Los Angeles twice to spend a few weeks getting to know his granddaughter. John, Patti and Anya all drove down to San Diego for Thanksgiving with Patti’s mother Sandy. They also stopped in and saw Patti’s brother Steve and sister-in-law Michelle as well as John’s sister Katie and her three boys: Calvin, Michael and Muffin. If you saw us this year, but are not on the list, it’s probably just because we didn’t think you were important enough to warrant mention.

Our daughter Anya remains the cutest baby on the planet — heck, she’s the cutest baby in the entire galaxy if we include Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes space-alien podling Suri. Anya’s favorite band remains Green Day, which she can identify by sound and request by name when we are in the car. Her hobbies include terrorizing the kitties with love of stalker-like intensity, dumping bowls of dry cereal on the ground then loudly yelling, “Uh-oh!” as if the fact that cereal spills when turned upside down was an altogether new development, and attempting to bite mommy’s nose — which both Anya and Daddy agree is pretty funny; Mommy, not so much.

Merry Christmas,

John, Patti & Anya