Yes, it's that time of the year again! That heart-warming (for me, at least) annual tradition where I send out an email filled with trivia and bad puns about our lives this year, and everyone skims it and never clicks on any of the links and then tells me how much they love it! But seriously, I know everyone clicks on the links, despite what my email tracking software says :-) As usual, if everything works properly, the links below should open in a new window -- and if you want to see the photos afterwards, they're in a shared album at Google Photos. You can also find larger versions of all of them, along with a whole bunch more pictures dating back to the Pleistocene Era, at the Ingram Family Photo Library (unless my server is down, in which case I apologize -- sometimes Zoe's cats kick the plug out). You can also find a more old-fashioned web version of this letter, complete with old-timey Santa images, at https://mathewingram.com/christmas. If you have any questions about the letter or just about the Ingram family in general, you can reach me at [email protected] -- unless of course you have a criticism, in which case please feel free to use the special email I have for that: [email protected]. I've had a lot of time on my hands recently (dramatic foreshadowing) so I was going through the archives on my website -- which I've had in one form or another since the late 1990s -- and I've been sending out and/or posting a Christmas Ingram family round-up for almost a quarter of a century. This is the first one I could find, and the main thing you'll probably notice is how short it is, proof that either a) A lot more stuff happened as the kids got older or b) I got more wordy over time (or a little of both). To be honest, I think this whole genre probably peaked with Caitlin and Wade's wedding on New Year's in 2018, or maybe with the birth in 2022 of The Mighty Quinn.

Speaking of The Mighty Quinn, if you met her, one of the first things she would tell you is that she is going to be a big sister soon! Due date is sometime in early April, I believe, depending on a variety of factors. Caitlin and Wade gave everyone the good news with a photo of the whole family, including Quinn holding an ultrasound photo-within-a-photo of the new arrival. Everyone is over the moon, needless to say, especially grandma and grampa, who will have twice as many grandbabies to spoil rotten when mom and dad aren't around! It seems like just yesterday that Quinn herself was brand new, and we were swaddling her up tight and wearing her around the house and trying to get her to make those adorable noises that babies make when they are happy. This must have worked, because Quinn talks non-stop now, like she is doing a sort of play-by-play colour commentary on the world around her. Those of you who have been paying attention to previous letters will know that Caitlin and Wade are both nurses — Caitlin in the pediatric intensive care unit and Wade in the emergency department of a different hospital — and the combination of day and night shifts can be challenging, but the silver lining is that Becky and I have been able to spend lots of time with Quinn, learning how to handle various detail-oriented breakfast requests (colour of bowl, colour of spoon, nature and amount of cereal, etc.) as well as watching her do gymnastics and go to swimming lessons with her other grampa. We got lots of Quinn-time at the cottage this summer too, and my heart just about exploded watching her play in the lake and make sand castles with her dad and play on the raft and go paddleboarding with her mom and kayaking with her dad. She also went for a canoe ride, and she even came with me for a kayak trip down the river to see the new baby loon! She helped me drive the pontoon boat a few times, and Wade and I rode our bikes to Killaloe so we could get one of their world-famous Beaver Tails, and there were lots of walks and running and bike rides and scootering down the driveway (in our pyjamas, of course, as one does) and a little vacuuming -- while at the same time pushing a shopping cart -- and helping dad do the barbecuing, and lots of hugs.

Quinn also has a fascination with big construction equipment (she was an excavator for Halloween), and coincidentally friends of ours were having some work done on their property, so we walked down there and asked the excavator operator if Quinn could stand on the giant tread of the machine and he said of course, so that was a pretty big deal. Quinn also got some beach time at a different beach in May, when Becky's niece got married at Sandbanks provincial park near Picton, which is right on Lake Ontario. In addition to all the Quinn time, this summer we finally got to meet Zoe's boyfriend Jack! He journeyed all the way from the depths of the Australian subcontinent to the wilds of Canada and met pretty much Zoe's entire family in a weekend, and to his credit only seemed a little shell-shocked :-) In an attempt to make him feel like part of the family, we somehow gave him food poisoning, but he soldiered through that and soon he was blending right in with the cottage activities. And he put up with our (okay, mostly my) terrible attempts at an Australian accent, jokes, and various references to hilarious Australian memes ("drop bears" for example -- just Google it). He even survived a kayak ride down the river with me, during which not one but two of our daughters texted me to "please take it easy on Jack." And while he was here, we dragged him over to our friends' place on Go Home Lake for a real Canadian Shield experience, including a canoe trip (which he handled quite well), and we pressured him into jumping off a cliff (not strictly true -- he said he wanted to). Afterwards we spent some time in the natural massage chair they have there, otherwise known as the waterfall between Go Home Lake and the outlet to Georgian Bay, which is just around the corner.

In non-Quinn-related news, Becky and I didn't go to Italy this spring for the first time in a long time (since COVID anyway). I proposed some panels for the journalism conference in Perugia that we usually go to -- I think this year would have been our ninth -- but none of them were accepted, so we didn't make the journey this year (there's always next year!) Instead, we spent about a month in Florida at the place that Becky's mom and dad bought many years ago, south of Sarasota on the Gulf side. It wasn't Italy, but it was very nice to just spend a few weeks being warm and going to the beach and for bike rides and playing pickleball. Classic old-person type stuff. We brought the kayaks down and I went for a great long paddle on a creek near the outlet and saw a couple of gators who seemed pretty harmless (one was asleep I think). And then my shoulder froze up from all the paddling unfortunately, and that was the only trip I went on while we were down there :-) I did a quick trip to New York for a conference, and spent some time in Bryant Park near the public library, one of my favourite spots in the Big Apple. And then Becky and I also did a whirlwind trip out to Calgary for a conference I'm involved with called Mesh, and I had an espresso martini and Becky had, well... some other kind of drink. And since we were in the land of the mountains, we decided to drive the rental car to the extreme southern end of the province where our friends Alan and Jilaine own a piece of property near Cardston, within shouting distance of the Canada-U.S. border, with a great view of Chief Mountain in Montana. We even got to stop at a neighbour's property where there was a corral full of horses, and Becky got up close and personal with a couple.

One of the other amazing things that happened this year is that we saw the most incredible display of Northern Lights at Thanksgiving. We heard the solar storm activity was going to make them better than usual, so we walked to the cemetery near the cottage because it has a great view of the northern sky, and we saw some fantastic green and red auroras dancing -- and as if that wasn't enough, we even saw a second once-in-a-lifetime celestial event at the same time: Meaghan saw what they thought was a plane's contrail but it turned out to be Comet A3, which only comes around every 80,000 years or so. Back at the cottage, Becky noticed the northern lights were just as incredible from our dock -- which doesn't even look north -- so we spent another hour or so watching from down there. What a show. And Thanksgiving with everyone on the screened-in porch was pretty great too. In August, we did our annual backwoods camping trip with our friends and neighbours Marc and Kris, who got swamped by an inconsiderate boat wake and flipped over, but were saved by a thoughful nearby cottager, who also loaned us some dry sleeping bags. Good Samaritans exist! We did another trip to Sandbanks park with Becky's brother and sister-in-law at the end of September, and had a great weekend of swimming and beach time, and Lake Ontario was so flat and calm that I paddled five kilometres or so out to the end of what's called Salmon Point. There's a great old abandoned lighthouse out there that was built in the 1870s and I pulled the kayak up and walked around it a bit (I wrote more about the trip here, along with some more photos). As the year came to a close, while everyone was eagerly awaiting Jack's return (he's coming back for about a month, including Christmas and New Year's). Becky and I did another quick trip out to Calgary for her company Christmas party, where I wore my notorious and extremely popular Christmas suit, and Calgary welcomed us with a real winter wonderland look: it had snowed a bunch and then got cold (minus 15 Celsius or so), so all the branches of the trees were lined with hoarfrost and overloaded with snow. It was like being inside a Christmas card. And of course we dragged our friends out to the mountains, because I can't visit Alberta without going out to see them. After that it was all downhill :-) That's a joke, but at least one thing did go downhill this year: my job. It went so far downhill that it disappeared completely -- the Columbia Journalism Review, where I've been the chief digital writer since 2017, decided that they didn't want to renew my contract for budgetary reasons, so I officially stopped work in September. However, before you start getting all weepy, I have lined up a couple of consulting gigs -- one short term and one that could turn into something longer -- so please keep your fingers and other digits crossed for me. I also agreed to do some social media and webmaster-type work for Becky's company -- they were using an outside agency and I offered to help them do it better and for less. Nothing like keeping things all in the family! And if you're interested, I also publish two newsletters -- one daily, with links to interesting news items, called When The Going Gets Weird, and one weekly called The Torment Nexus, about technology and culture. They are free, but donations are gratefully accepted :-) Apart from the whole job thing, it was a great year all around, and it was especially great if what you like is hanging out with Quinn, whether it's in the big green egg thing at the park or colouring with crayons at The Farm for Easter, or having a snack while sitting in the bay window of cousin Jessica's house, or wearing matching plaid jackets with grampa, or having a picnic with Zoe, or getting all bundled up in a warm towel after a swim, or sitting with Meaghan on a boat ride, or asking the waiter for the check after brunch, or trying to use four shovels at the same time, or using the Swiffer, or splashing up a storm in the shallows, or hanging out in floaty chairs, and swimming with grandma. And when Quinn wasn't around, there was time for sunset kayaking with Zoe and sunset dinners on the boat and just regular old sunsets, which you've probably noticed I can never seem to get enough of. And that's it! If you made it to the end, congratulations. Thanks for clicking on all the links :-) Hope you and yours had a great year, and from all of us here at Ingram and Co. I would like to wish you all a happy holiday -- whatever flavour of holiday you celebrate -- and hope that 2025 brings you health, wealth, and the time to enjoy both!