Thursday, December 16, 2021

Christmas 1995

 My daughter Moe texted me the other day. 

“Hey Dad.  Do you remember that outrageous over the top Christmas letter you sent out with the Christmas cards to the family when we were kids?”

“Yes.”

“What was up with that?”

“I was tired of those braggy once a year letters about everyone’s accomplishments and thought I’d throw a little satire at the relatives.”

“You think you can find it?”

“Yeah.  I think so.  I think I have everything I’ve ever written.”

I must have spent an hour looking through old Word files on my desk top computer in the shack before giving up.  Later I asked Colleen about it.

“I think there are copies in a folder in the filing cabinet.”

“What?  When is the last time you found something I wrote on paper in a manila folder?”

“I don’t know.  But I think I did something with it a long time ago.  It was nuts if I remember.”

Sure enough, I found a manila folder with my wife’s handwriting on the tab ‘McClure Christmas  letter 1995’.  Here it is.  Now digital.  Still over the top, outrageous and nuts.

In 1995 we were an average family living in a little Cape Cod house with one bathroom and a busy schedule.  We got a lot of Christmas cards in the mail those days and a fair number with the year in review letter tucked inside. 

These days we get very few Christmas cards and no letters like that at all.  I think it qualifies as a dying art.  Maybe I helped kill it.  But it was fun to write.  I hope you appreciate, maybe even enjoy it.

 

                                                                                                                   December 17, 1995

Dear Friends,

It has been a whole year since I sat down to write our Christmas letter, and I don’t know where the time went.  It was quite a year here at the McClure household.  1995 started out with a bang on New Year’s Day. 

As you know, we’ve always kept a lot of pets.  Mom and I were sleeping in while the kids were playing in the living room.  Maureen was teaching Petie the parakeet to fly on command, in big swoops across the room.  Dean had Lou, the monitor lizard, out of his cage basking by the fireplace while Sadie our bulldog slept under the coffee table. 

As Petie was completing one of his swoops Lou, warmed up and hungry, launched himself off the floor, grabbed Petie in mid-air, and swallowed him in three quick gulps.  As our children watched, the bulge which was Petie slid down the lizard’s throat. We were awakened by their screams.

As we ran into the room Sadie the bulldog, always resentful of the lizard, rushed across the floor and sunk her jaws into Lou the lizard pinning him down, writhing and hissing.   Dean was screaming because his lizard looked to be in grave danger.  Maureen was hysterical because her parakeet was gone, and Sadie had a set to her jaws that clearly meant business.

Without hesitating, I scooped up the lump of flesh that previously was our three pets and rushed out the door to deliver the wriggling mass to our neighbor Vic the Veterinarian.  My family trailed behind me. 

Vic, a bachelor, was having a quiet Sunday morning in his bathrobe listening to radio church music and reading the paper.  Our kids screamed out the details of the situation.  Realizing the dire predicament of our parakeet, Vic brought out his black bag, gave both the lizard and the bulldog a quick injection of a sedative, and forced a large brass ring into the lizard’s throat.  Within seconds he was holding the unmoving slimy body of Petie in his hand.

With my family huddled around our pets in a New Year’s tableau, we watched as Vic tried to breathe life back into Petie’s wet and compressed little body.  After what seemed an eternity, Petie’s wings began to flutter ever so slightly.  The McClures let out a cheer on that first morning of 1995 in celebration of life itself.  Vic stitched up Lou the lizard’s wounds, dried Petie’s feathers with a hair dryer, and attended to Sadie as she recovered from the doggie downer.  When order was restored, we put the animals back into their cages and took Vic out for breakfast.

The rest of the year was not nearly as eventful.  Let me sum up what’s happening right now with members of the McClure family.

Colleen has left her teaching job at Ottawa High School and is now working for the Clinton administration as an aide to Hillary.  She functions both as liaison to Midwest Democratic party organizations and as a consultant to Hillary on foreign policy.  She was lucky enough to accompany Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea on their recent trip to Ireland and coordinated their visits to pubs in Belfast, Derry, and Dublin.  Although she is in Washington more than we would all like we are quite proud of her.  We just hope Bill is re-elected.  Both Bill and Hillary extend their warmest regards to each of you and the entire McClure extended family. I think you may all now call yourselves “Friends of Bill.”

Maureen is twelve and is training for the Olympics in Atlanta this coming summer.  This has happened quickly and is quite a surprise given that she just this year joined our local swim team, the Ottawa YMCA Dolphins.  She has exceptional talent in the breaststroke, registering state times her first week of practice.  With hard work she quickly moved up into national qualifying times and now finds herself in the company of international qualifying young women.  There is a little girl in Arizona posting faster times and of course a number of Chinese swimmers, but it looks good for Moe at the 1996 Olympic time trials and as a medal winner at the games being held in Atlanta this summer.  We have already purchased seats at the swimming venue and our plane tickets.

Dean will be ten in June and will graduate from Ottawa High School.  Dean as you may know has been certified a genius by the MENSA organization and is being courted by universities throughout the world, including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Oxford, and the Sorbonne in Paris. 

The hardest task for Dean is choosing a field in which to apply his talents.  In addition to a deep love and mastery of foreign languages (6) and literature of all kinds, and considerable talent as a sculptor, along with the potential of becoming a concert clarinetist, he has written several computer models for predicting world population growth on his mainframe computer and has collaborated with surgeons from Johns Hopkins to develop a new procedure for angioplasty.  We just want him to be happy.  All in all, he is a very well-adjusted little ten-year old.

With all the changes and activities my family is involved in I have resigned my position as Director of the Youth Service Bureau.  My main job now is to help Colleen coordinate her schedule, get Maureen to swim practice, and make sure Dean gets enough sleep.  I also take care of our pets, shop, and cook.  In between those tasks I discovered more free time and have just published my fourth best-selling novel under a pen name.  My publisher is quite pleased as am I. The extra income has come in handy.

To wrap up 1995, our family is flying to Paris.  Dean is visiting the campus of the Sorbonne, playing clarinet with the Paris Symphony, and is displaying a number of his  sculptures at the Louvre.  Maureen will swim at an international competition just outside Paris, getting a chance to compete against the Chinese, and Colleen will be doing some advance work for Hillary and Chelsea’s spring tour of European capitals. 

As for me, I’m meeting with a publishing house in Paris which is interested in translating my first novel into French.  I’m also taking a side trip to Morocco where they have begun shooting, on location in Fez, a movie based on my second novel “Travels with Habib.”  It should be playing in a theater near you this fall.  While in Morocco I plan to look at real estate on the Mediterranean coast as a summer home and an investment.  Vic is watching over our pets while we’re away.

So, from all of us in Ottawa to all of you, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.  We will be spending New Year’s Eve on the banks of the Seine in Paris.  Do drop us a line and let us know what you’re doing with your lives as we hurtle together towards the new millennium. 

Adieu and Bon Voyage.

The McClures

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