The 2021 Christmas Letter That Wasn’t Sent:                Date:  December 17, 2021

“Well, well, my how time flies!  I can’t believe another year has gone by” is how I’m supposed to start the traditional Christmas Letter 2021.  But that isn’t how I’m doing it.

Like other connoisseurs of the annual letter, I’ll use my first name even though I’m the one writing the letter and everybody knows it.  

This past year has been spent with Diana still whining about her pet list of COVID symptoms, all 16 of them.  She hopes people will ask her how she is doing so she can wail on about nobody understanding and how can they think it’s in her head when she can describe everything to the last agonizing itch and twitch, skin-stinging, ear-ringing everything.  Her husband, Tom, on the other hand, never complains about anything including the massive head gash he sustained from insisting on going out to sweep the forest floor during our freakish burst-a-thon of 60mph wind, no hat, raking underneath the breaking limbs of the giant maples while Diana could only watch from the window for a few minutes, nervously twirling her twizzle of 65 human hairs she still has left enough to bind in a ponytail with a teensy elastic band the size orthodontists use.  Yeah, and so the hydrogen peroxide and gauze don’t come out until getting ready for bed and she asks him why the hell he didn’t tell her sooner and he coquettishly says he needed to pretend it didn’t happen or he’d have to compete with all her wicked symptoms that would reduce the stitch-worthy gash to the status of a mere paper cut.  Well, that’s it about health, and I’m sure, good friends and family, you have your own stories in this category of breaking news.

Meanwhile, let me tell you that both Tom and Diana are making great headway in downsizing.  Diana rummaged through her 255lb. footlocker of letters and photographs and threw away a dozen pictures of non-things, photos of a thumb, of strange people, someone’s bald head, unknown child grimacing, a desert somewhere no people, all the who-cares kind of things.  Tom did his part by paper shredding the fake tax refund form they got in the mail, obviously a scam to get them to return it in the fake bar-coded Business Reply Envelope (the word Business spelled wrong, Busness) supplying the perps with all the personal ID information requested.  He had to get rid of that form himself in case her favorite symptom, brain fog, had her filling it out and sending it in with an Easter Seal sticker in the postage stamp place.  Don’t laugh, could happen.  Other downsizing included boxing up a batch of paperwork they don’t understand or is just plain annoying and taking it out to the garage (exact word as trash, only without the ‘b’) to age nicely like a good wine.  They call it dissemination by means of neglect.  They laugh.

On to more important stuff.  Compared to everyone else, Mr. and Mrs. of The Forest seem to have a real Shangri-La kind of life.  Living on a shelf 100 feet above a creek and no neighbors in sight, they can forget there is an out-there.  They scream when the doorbell rings.  Who in their right mind would venture up the ‘driveway from hell?’  They don’t even want to.  Turns out it is Diana’s sister who made arrangements to swing by for a hello but of course Diana forgot.  At least she didn’t tell the person at the door that there are no sisters.  It’s never Amazon.  They don’t ring anymore, they just pile up the boxes on the porch and run for their lives down the ‘driveway from hell.’ Tom makes himself scarce in the vicinity of harsh and megahertz cackling that always fills the air whenever those two sisters get together.  Add the third sister in and neighbors down the street start closing their windows and nearby dogs begin to howl.  But I digress.  

 Other mentionables:  Speaking of business, both Diana and Tom agreed to just forget trying to update the 12-page excel spreadsheet with 600 line items of companies, services, and online sites — their corresponding user names, passwords, secret code words and pin numbers.  They just started piling up post-it notes with the updates, one on top of the other.  There’s about a whole tablet worth now.  Some of those websites they’ll never go to again in their lives anyway.  It was either that or do a once-over changing every single user name, password, pin number, and secret word to the same thing for all of the entities.  User name:  “Us” — Password:  “Go” — Pin number: “0000” — Secret word:  “Wanker”.

Happy New Year and the best way to make it that way is to skip 2022 and just call it 1951.

Love,

Mrs. Cleaver