A Christmas Letter

Merry Christmas 2013

Dear friends, family and anonymous blog readers (but preferably not the creepy blog traffic troller-bots who stalk the Den regularly),

It's been six long years since we've sent a formal Christmas letter along with the standard photo card. There are a host of reasons for the lack of said letter. Surely one of those reasons is my poor time management (seriously, it's not like Christmas is a sneaky surprise every year), but more than anything I blame social media and the interweb. It has changed the Christmas letter forever.

Before the explosion of social media, the Christmas letter was a way, and in some cases a not so subtle way, to brag about your family, I mean let people know what happened to your family during the year. The interweb is chock full of the more horrific examples of these letters and I suspect you've held on to some of the better ones you've gotten over the years. But now, in the interweb age, the Christmas letter is nearly dead. If you're tied into social media at all, your friends and family already know what happened to you during the year.

The residents, both full and part-time, of the Den are an example of this. Between us, we have:

• Six Facebook accounts
• Six Instagram accounts
• Six Twitter accounts
• Four chunks of presence on the Pinterest

With that presence, our lives are varying degrees of wide open. So you pretty much know what's happened to us this year, thus nullifying the biggest reason for a Christmas letter. In other words, no need to rehash the events of 2013 here.

I think the Christmas letter is nearly dead., another casualty of the internet age. In an absurd twist, as the traditional Christmas letter dies, traditional horrible brick-and-mortar retailer Kmart still, somehow, manages to survive. I don't get it.

I do want to take a bit of virtual ink though to say what an amazing year this has been here in the Den. We've grown (and I am not referring only to my unfortunate waist line and moobs) with the arrival of the Baby Awesome - being grandparents RULES! We've advanced further in school, with both CAL and The Boy getting ever closer to graduation from their respective schools. There have been challenges but we've learned from them. We've been happy. And happy is good.

Merry Christmas!