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Christmas 1989


Sometime in 1990 (?)

Dear friends,

This letter is a little bit different than most of the Christmas letters you've gotten so far from other families; this one's LATE!! The Vogts like to keep up their tradition of being fashionably late for just about everything.

Lots has happened this year, and our end-of-year schedule was more hectic than usual (which we'll explain later), so here's a New Year's Letter for you!

Life for us has been full of many ups and downs this past year. The ups have been "upper" than usual, but the downs have way down there, too. We enjoyed our first Christmas in our new house last year (1988) with an eleven foot Christmas tree and lots of friends, relatives, and ornaments around. It was like old times for (Gene's) Dad on Christmas morning, having little children around and stockings hung on the mantle. He really enjoyed himself. We had all settled in to being a happy extended family, and the girls really enjoyed having Grampy living with us.

It was a difficult spring for us this past year, as we had another miscarriage in April, and ten days later Dad passed away peacefully in his sleep. Through these very difficult times, we found great comfort and strength in our love for each other. As a couple we shared these burdens, and they truly were half as heavy. Gene's family also found comfort and support in being together during this time, and we all cried and laughed together as part of the grieving process. Activity seemed to gravitate to our house, and that made our new house feel even more like our home. It was more than a little bit difficult to finally get back to the business of life.

Lynn started working around Mother's Day at a flower shop in Brighton owned by some friends of ours. She found it to be an excellent calming influence to be creative and work with beauty after our traumatic spring. She's still there, still learning, and enjoying it a lot. The holidays supplied some trauma of their own, though, what with everyone in the entire WORLD ordering flowers through this one shop for Christmas (or so it seemed).

Summer brought with it warmer weather, and the girls (and the grownups) had a lot of fun in the pool. Many a day Gene would come home from work to find half the water splashed out! We celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary in July, and decided to go for at least 15 more. Megan spent her first week at overnight summer camp this year, and loved it. She wants to go for the horse camp this summer. She's in fourth grade this year, and doing great. She's more relaxed (any MORE relaxed and she'd fall asleep), and still reads more than the rest of her class combined. Audrey had a laid-back summer, and really learned to like the water. She's in second grade this year, and doing super. She's becoming quite a reader as well, though not quite as voracious as Megan. Audrey is involved in a zillion things this year. She's taking jazz, tap, and ballet dance lessons, and goes to Brownies. She can't wait for her dance recital in the spring. Megan is taking figure skating lessons this fall, and has begun taking piano lessons as well. She seems to be a natural on the keyboard (at least her instructor says so!).

Our Thanksgiving holiday was filled with family and friends. In addition to most of Lynn's family coming to our house for a traditional meal, we also had some of Gene's friends from work who for one reason or another had no place to go. It really felt like we were living the true meaning of the holiday.

Throughout the year we as a family had been saving our pennies for something which we all had dreamed about for a long time (and is also the reason why this is so late a Christmas letter). In December, we went to DisneyWorld!! We spent a week in Florida (9-16 December, just before the real cold weather down there), and four days in DisneyWorld itself. If we gathered up all the positive adjectives stored in this computer spell-checker, they would still not be enough to describe our time there! We had the time of our lives! Megan and Audrey never once touched the ground the whole time we were there; they just floated around in air. (Lynn's) Mom came with us, so there were three generations of little kids skipping around the parks (there are three). It was, in a word, wonderful.

And it's also the reason why everything else associated with Christmas was so late. Going away for a week, two weeks before Christmas, sounded like a GREAT idea back in May. As the time approached, the idea began to sound more and more crazy. It was. We couldn't have picked a better time to go, crowd-wise, but we couldn't have picked a worse time to go, holiday-wise. We made it, though, and we survived. We just finished an album of memories, so if anyone wants to stop by and see it, give us a call!

Christmas this year was hectic and fun-filled. Lynn was working a lot at the shop, and we had five extra over-night guests for Christmas eve, with two more walk-ins Christmas morning. We had eleven stockings hung by the chimney with care, and St. Nicholas did himself proud!

All the Vogts wish you a happy and prosperous New Year. May all the times of your life be good ones!

 

Love,
Lynn, Gene, Megan, and Audrey

 

P.S. I mentioned to Lynn that, what with this being the start of the nineteen-nineties and all, we were entering our third decade of marriage (70's, 80's and now 90's). She hit me. Hard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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