Hi everyone! Merry Christmas from Becky and Mathew and Caitlin and Meaghan and Zoe Ingram. We are settling in to our new home near the Rouge river in Toronto — Scarborough to be precise. I (Mathew) am working on the Globe and Mail’s live news website, an experiment that launched last year just in time for the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Living in Rouge Hill as they call it makes it easy to get in to the Globe by taking the GO train, which runs right by our house (we are down by the lake). For Becky, much of the year was taken up by a court case in Peterborough, after our friend Kris’s dad was brutally murdered last year by a mentally-ill neighbour on Halloween night.
Other than that, we spent some time in Florida at Becky’s mom and dad’s place in Bay Indies, a retirement park near Venice, south of Sarasota. We took a boat ride across to an island called Rum Bay that has a great BBQ rib restaurant on it, then walked around on the private beach where Zoe did one of her trademark poses. There was a parade and all the girls and Becky got dressed up and made friends with some neighbour kids, and then we went to an aquarium called Moat Marine up in Sarasota and spent some time with Becky’s cousin and her family at their place on Siesta Key. And we had lots of great beach time and pool time and dinner at a place out by the Venice airport (where some of the terrorists from 9/11 did their training apparently, as I found out later) and ran down the jetty at Sharky’s out near Casperson’s beach.
Back home there was a birthday party at Bob and Edie’s cottage in Muskoka and climbing on rocks in the woods and then some jumping on the trampoline at my uncle John’s place in Mississauga and another visit to the cottage in Muskoka in June and a big get-together with Becky’s family and then her cousin Libbie got married at Toronto’s hilarious fake castle Casa Loma where Zoe did her famous Zoe face. There was lots of swimming at the cottage and picnics on the deck and rafting and Meaghan helped her grampa make bread in the bread machine and there was some go-carting and mini golf and tubing and picking berries and saunas to be had and more of Zoe’s trademark posing for the camera. Meaghan had fun in Girl Guides, which Becky helped out with, and the kids got together with their cousins Scott and Curtis and Lindsay at Golden Lake and Meaghan tried the windsurfer and Zoe did some minnow catching and then ran out of gas.
Continue reading “Ingram Family Christmas Letter for 2002”