Our Christmas letter

Dear Friends and Family,

Christmas has passed as I write this letter, and those of you who know me well will NOT be shocked to hear this. But we have had such a full year, right up until this, the end of it, that I’m glad of a few extra days to think about it, to feel thankful for it and to decide what to share with you.
As you all know, Greg and I are journalists, and I’ve decided to do this year’s letter in time-honored journalistic fashion: a look back at the top stories, plus some clever and insightful visuals. At least, I hope they’ll be clever and insightful. We’ll see!

January: The year began with Greg and Stac conducting their annual “I can’t believe football season is almost over” mourning period, as well as this year’s auxiliary “I can’t believe we’re old enough to have a 10-year-old daughter!” period of disbelief. Many pounds of chips and dip were consumed, leading to many ridiculous New Year’s resolutions regarding fitness. We decided to give up soda, our iron-clad resolve lasting approximately three days before a catastrophic cave-in occurred.

February: This month was marked mainly by the weirdness that accompanies boredom, as the family took scads of silly pictures of one another playing in the snow, molding their hair into weird shapes in the tub and, in Greg’s case, making comical panicked faces as he realized he’s without any Valentine’s Day gift ideas.

March: The family was plunged into anxiety by Emma’s participation in the Peruvian Park Elementary School science fair, whose 2,500-page manual of rules and regulations includes prohibition against experimenting on live animals, using any type of explosive and displaying any type of caustic substance, up to and including water, dirt, live plants and, apparently, air and sunshine. This caused difficulties when Emma’s experiment turned out to involve plants, dirt, water, air and sunshine. Miraculously, she cleverly skirted the rules to produce a project, “The Peat Under Our Feet: Which Soil is Best?” that won at the school level and advanced to district competition. Just call it the geeky Kratz version of March madness.

April: We had an unexpected visit from Aunt Jen, Uncle Brad and beautiful 18-month-old Bella, who we got to tend for a day. In the manner of a newly-hatched chick, she imprinted on Emma following a nap and refused to go to anyone else for most of the afternoon. Aunt Jen, a science-fair veteran thanks to her award-winning oldest daughters, Hannah and DeDee, was able to give valuable help with the construction of the project display. And if you think we obsessed too much over the science fair, well, you might be right.

May: This month brought the worst news of the year for us: we lost our dear friend, Keith Young, who died just before Memorial Day while jogging near his home in Green River, Wyo. Keith was more than a neighbor to the members of the Ray Johnson family during our decade in Green River: he was a friend, a brother and a second dad to us Johnson kids. His influence continues to guide us and shape our lives in so many good ways, and we miss him.
Back at home, the school year wound down with programs, presentations and awards, all of which Stac documented for the school newsletter she produces each month as part of her service on the Peruvian Park PTA. Kate’s class sang, danced and recited nursery rhymes. Her favorite parts were reciting “Banbury Cross” all by herself and fetching us hot-cross buns afterward. We also had a great visit with Grandma and Grandpa Kratz and Aunt Lisa, during which we were amazed by our visit to the Museum of Ancient Life, a rockin’ dinosaur museum in Lehi, only about 20 minutes from our house. If you’re ever in the neighborhood, we strongly recommend you give it a try! The South Dakota/Iowa Kratzes left too soon to see Emma and Grace collect the top academic awards for their fourth- and first-grade classes, which would play nicely into Grandma Kratz’ conviction that each of her four grandchildren are “geniuses.” Greg celebrated his, um, 28th birthday by receiving some nice shorts and T-shirts that he will never get a chance to wear thanks to working 50 hours a week and spending another 20 or so at the church, doing bishop-ish things.

June: The beginning of Our Summer of Travel. Those shorts and T-shirts came in handy, after all, when we set out the very day school ended to drive to Texas. We did this 29-hour horror-fest straight through for about the fourth time, and we can tell you it doesn’t get any easier with repeat trips. But arriving in Texas made it more than worth it, as we left right away for a week at the Galveston beach house Grammy and Ba Johnson had again rented for us. The house is on Pirate Beach (a total thrill for pirate-loving Emma), about 20 miles southwest of Galveston, and it’s far enough away from town that it basically is a private beach. In other words, it’s paradise. For a week, we loafed, played, ate together and just had a wonderful time enjoying one another, the beach and the great weather. There’s always a sea breeze in Galveston, so even though the temps got into the 90s, we always felt cool. One of the many highlights of the trip (the best being Great- Grandma and Grandpa Orson and Jessie Johnson joining us) was our evening with the chocolate fountain, always a hit with the grandkids, and also the grown-up kids. One of the few low-lights was Emma and DeDee being stung by jellyfish, in Em’s case more than once. She now says jellyfish are her number-one nemesis. But it didn’t keep them off the boogie boards, or not for long. Pirate Beach is excellent for kids because of its gradual slope and warm, shallow water, and we loved catching crabs and watching them race back to the water, collecting shells, eating sandy sandwiches under our beach shelter, boogie boarding, floating the waves on tubes, building sand castles and soaking up the sun. We did venture out to take a ferry ride and have some pizza at Uncle Zach’s favorite buffet, CiCi’s, but we spent most of this trip being beach house homebodies — and loving it!
At the end of our beach-house week, Greg headed back to Utah to bring home some more bacon, while Jen and I headed up to Georgetown, Texas, north of Austin, to drop Em and DeDee at the “Camp of Champs” sponsored by Jen’s employer, the Texas Association of Basketball Coaches. For four days the two girls slept in college dorms and got excellent coaching on basketball fundamentals from some of Texas’ best coaches and high-school players. Emma had a great time and has really developed a love of basketball. The bad news was that, just after we got back from Georgetown, Jen and Brad discovered that their house had been burglarized. They had several stressed and sleepless nights trying to discover all that was taken and get a security system installed double-quick. Jen and I made the drive to Georgetown one more time to pick up the girls, and Dee was impressively brave and positive when Jen told her she’d lost a video-game system to the thieves.
Shortly after this, Hannah left for Utah to attend our LDS congregation’s summer camp for young women aged 12 to 18, so she and Uncle Greg got some quality bonding time talking about X-Men, comic books, Hellboy, which X-Men are cool and which ones drool, and also the X-Men. Hannah also stayed in Clover with great-grandma and great-grandpa Johnson and in Tooele with our cousins, the Lawson family, where she and Spence Lawson bonded over their mutual love of the theater.
But our busy June in Texas wasn’t over yet: we still had Kate’s 6th birthday to celebrate (shockingly, it was a pool party) and two weeks of swim lessons in Grammy’s and Ba’s backyard pool for all the girls (plus two weeks of holding Max while bobbing around the pool for Stac). Grace and Kate got so comfy in the water that they actually had breakfast in the pool one morning, and we are so grateful to Jen’s friend, Melissa, who gave the kids such great tutoring in swimming. They went from being nervous in the water to being little fish. We also squeezed in a surprise party for Ba’s, um, 40th birthday, which we only pulled off because he was in Europe the whole time we were planning it.
Soon after that, Stac, the Kratz kids, DeDee and Grammy set off for the drive back to Utah, but we didn’t do it straight through this time. We stopped in Kansas City to spend the day with Greg’s Aunt Kay and Uncle Glenn Schoenfish and to stock up on Kansas City Chiefs and Royals merchandise for Greg. We spent a night in Omaha, took a walk near our hotel to see all the damage from their wind storms and met up with Grandma and Grandpa Kratz and Aunt Lisa at the amazing and stupendous Henry Doorly Zoo, which is hands down the best zoo I’ve ever seen. We also spent a night in Cheyenne and had breakfast with Alison and Byron Killpack, members of the Keith and Doreen Young family and great friends of ours, before heading down the home stretch for the Salt Lake valley. We left June 29 and arrived in Salt Lake July 2, so it was a leisurely and very fun trip home, and the kids were great. We also drove through a totally spectacular Midwestern lighting storm, which Grammy had never seen.

July: Grammy had to get right back to Texas, so we had just enough time to have dinner in Layton with her uncle, Mavin Campbell, before she flew back home. That very day, Aunt Cass arrived with Jason Caperna, her beau (I chose this designation over “gentleman friend,” though either one fits Jason, who is a peach!), to spend the weekend with us and to visit with her good friends, the Bird family. The rest of the month was occupied with Greg and Stac getting a taste of what it’s like parenting six kids, as we had Hannah and DeDee with us for the remainder of July. Here are our impressions: the noise level is ratcheted up big time, there are more fights, there’s immeasurably more mess and it’s a wonderful time. Hannah and Dee made a valiant and largely successful effort not to fight, and we had fun getting drive-in food, messing around at home, playing in the sprinklers and on the slip and slide, visiting the library and our teensy local aquarium and going camping. The kids, heavily influenced by Hannah’s love of comic books, formed their own superhero cadre, the Crap Mutants, who have, as you may have guessed, lame mutant powers that would get them laughed out of the X-Men. The worst part, by far, was when they left, and we’ve missed them ever since.

August: Luckily, we got to see Grammy and Ba again to make us feel better! They came out to stay in their Park City timeshare, and we were able to spend most of their stay with them. I guess we’re unusual Utah residents, in that we tend to head to Park City in the summer rather than the winter, but it’s so great up there in August: cooler temperatures, a slowed-down pace and, this year, the Olympics, which we watched every night. The best was watching the U.S. men defeat France in the relay, jumping up and down and screaming and, when we paused, realizing that the Marriott guests both above and below us were doing the exact same thing. National unity is a great thing! And it’s good we had that moment, because we were about to swing into the home stretch of the presidential elections, a pretty sore test of unity! The rest of the visit we spent swimming, playing in the creek near the hotel, going down the alpine slide and enjoying one another’s company.

September: Though the summer was very full, it seemed to go by in a flash, so we were all a little surprised when it was time to go back to school. All three girls are in all-day school now, so Stac has been enjoying the time alone with Max, though she didn’t much care for the constant asking of, “Where sissies? Time to get sissies?” during the first week of school. She solved the problem by arranging with two friends to swap babysitting so that we can all help in our kids’ classes and Max gets friend time with other little dudes. That means that Monday is just Stac and Max; Tuesday is Stac and Max plus a few hours with 3-year-old Jack and 1-year-old Ike; Wednesday is Stac at school for a few hours while Max plays at Brad’s house; Thursday is Brad at our house for a couple of hours; and Friday is Max at Jack’s house for a couple of hours. Does this sound confusing? There will be a test later.

October: A rotten month, but not in the way you’d think. Stac’s friend, Erica, gave us a frog costume because she’d heard I wanted one for Max. Once he saw the “rotten” (his word for frog), he wouldn’t wear anything else. He wore it for four days straight, day and night, until we cleverly got it off him by letting him take a bath and then whisking it off to be laundered and hidden until Halloween. We enjoyed a visit from Grandma and Grandpa Kratz and Aunt Lisa in the middle of the month and spent the rest of it raking leaves, jumping in the piles and getting dressed up for various Halloween events. Grace was a veterinarian for all the parties, while Emma was variously an exploding bottle of Diet Coke and Jamie Hyneman, the host of “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel. Kate was a pink pig, a cowgirl and a princess, depending on what party she was attending, and Max was, as you might guess, a “rotten” from beginning to end. Stac was Dumbledore, while Daddy, being his usual festive self, refused to dress up. We’re all very proud of taking second place, for the second year in a row, with our Mythbusters-themed trunk at our LDS ward’s Trunk or Treat party. We’re number two! We’re number two!

November: As an excellent post-election restorative, Stac had a chance in mid-November to travel to Texas, sans kids, to surprise Grammy on her, um, 40th birthday. It was a great weekend, starting with a day spent with the Thomases that ended with Grammy’s party at a local Mexican restaurant. To say she was surprised is, I think, an understatement. She was overwhelmed to have all of her kids together (I think of us as “The Original Ray Johnsons,” which would also be a good name for a rock band) and we were pretty happy about it, too! Stac celebrated her 39th birthday (yes, it really is her 39th!) in Texas with one of Grammy’s delicious Darla’s cakes, a Johnson family classic, and had just enough time for a mall date with Uncle Z (look at stores, eat at food court) and some souvenir shopping before flying home. Greg took great care of the kids while she was gone. Grace turned 8 on Nov. 5, and Grammy, Ba and Z came out for a week at the end of the month to attend her baptism and to celebrate Thanksgiving with us. Grace was beautiful in white and seemed all ready to be baptized. She was so happy to have Ba baptize her and she was very reverent as she was confirmed by Daddy. Great-Grandpa Johnson and Uncle Z were the witnesses, and it was a great blessing to know that all of these worthy holders of the priesthood are part of our Grace’s life, and the lives of all of our children. It seems such a short time ago that she was a 3-pound preemie with huge eyes and a tiny, skin-and-bones body, and she’s such a strong, funny and vibrant girl now. We are blessed. We also were blessed to have Grammy, Ba and Z for Thanksgiving, where we enjoyed Ba’s potato rolls and lots of other goodies. As a pre-Christmas surprise, Grammy and Ba bought us a Wii, and we really haven’t seen the kids since, though we’ve heard a lot about their “miis” (for non-Wii owners, those are the avatars you make to play the Wii).

December: There’s good news and bad news, and we’ll dispense with the bad news first: The BYU Cougars lost their Las Vegas Bowl game to Arizona. Worse, a couple weeks earlier they lost the annual “Holy War” game to Utah! Hopefully in time the grief will fade. On the good side, and in all seriousness, we’re greatly blessed to be ending the year in good health (well, relatively good: Greg’s getting over a bout with pneumonia that made Christmas pretty interesting!) and having good fortune, good friends and wonderful family times throughout the year. We know so many friends and loved ones who have lost jobs this year or who are experiencing other trials, and our hearts and prayers and love go out to you even as they fill with thankfulness for all the Lord’s tender mercies to us. For me, songs like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “White Christmas,” which were written at another time that our nation was experiencing war and economic hardship, are particularly meaningful this year: And, of course, we love listening to songs like, “O Holy Night,” which tell the story of the One whose life can lift and comfort all of us, no matter what we are experiencing.
We wish you all the best in the coming year and hope that God’s blessings rest abundantly upon you in 2009.