Thirtieth Anniversary Edition                                                                 1997
     Thirty years ago Paul was five months old;  he had two older brothers and three older sisters, a dog, a cat and three kittens. For some reason, I decided to consolidate my correspondence and wrote our first Christmas Letter. I begged forgiveness of its recipients for this submission to a "form letter." Many years later when I pared the list of letter recipients, this precipitated a deluge of unhappy feedback. So, here we are thirty years later still pondering over recapping our year on a page. This year its just Ray and I and our cats-no, not the same ones!
The first letter was typed on my trusty Underwood typewriter and "dittoed."  Now, I know there are some of you who have no idea what "dittoed" as a print media means, and I'm not going to even try to explain it in this day and age.  We progressed from there to mimeographing, photocopying, dot matrix printing, laser printing, color printing, and this year Internet and E-mailed to those who have net addresses.  So, the more things remain the same, the more they change!

To continue the tradition of bringing you up-to-date on our family news, I'd better get back to 1997 events and quit reminiscing. The holidays really snuck up on me this year. Vacation, square dancing, and various other things kept me going without realizing that Thanksgiving was upon us, and soon, Christmas! Looks like everyone will be here this year. Paul arrives from Wisconsin the 21st, Mark on the 23rd, and Bev and Rick leave with Selina to visit Rick's family the day after Christmas. 

  Continued on the next page.  Click here to go there 
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