Category: Misc

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Almost everything you need to know about this piece is in the headline. Except why, of course 🙂 In any case, this essay by Richard Kemick is worth a read: “I can’t remember not wanting a miniature Christmas village. It’s like how I can’t remember when I first realized I have bad posture: some things you never have to learn about yourself but rather just have to accept. I moved out of my parents’ house at seventeen, but my heart has never left—not out of some romantic notion of remembering my roots, but because the idea of renting an apartment with enough room to store my Christmas village borders on lunacy.”

A WWI vet’s unorthodox plan to reach the summit of Mount Everest

One summer day in 1933, a British man named Maurice Wilson clutched the stick of his tiny, open air biplane and watched his fuel gauge dwindle. He had only learned to fly two months earlier, but inexperience was not his biggest problem. His lengthy list of troubles included the angry British officials he had just left behind in Bahrain, the certainty of arrest if he turned left to land in Persia, the roiling waves of the Persian Gulf below, and the increasing likelihood that his fuel would run out before he reached a safe landing. But Wilson pushed on, knuckles white, because he sought a larger goal, a quest that he believed to be his God-given destiny: to crash his plane into Mount Everest.

This Christmas feels a little different than it did last year, where we were worried about the Omicron variant of COVID. This time, we’re worried about the BF.7 variant, and a resurgent flu virus, and RSV, all of which have combined to create what the news calls a “tri-demic” 🙂 Remember when we weren’t worried about pandemics, and we just wandered around hugging and kissing people without a care in the world? It seems like so long ago now. Anyway, we are going to try and make Christmas as normal as it could be this year, while still taking reasonable health precautions. And why are we concerned about RSV, you might ask, since it mostly affects young children? Because we have one! Not Becky and I, of course, but our daughter Caitlin and her husband Wade, who had a beautiful baby girl named Quinn Leanne Hemrica in June. We are grandparents! And yes, this means we are really old!

Note: If you just want to see the photos from this letter all in one place, there’s a Google Album of them. And if you want to see more photos of the Ingram clan, check out the Ingram Family photo album, which has every photo I’ve ever taken, plus a bunch of old print photos that I’ve scanned in over the years.

Okay, now that I’ve given away the big news, back to the letter. We started the year, as we often do, by eating a huge amount of delicious food in a kind of New Year’s smorgasbord, and we did some skating on the pond near the house. Just to recap, we moved to Buckhorn (about two hours north of Toronto) a few years ago, just before COVID hit. Good timing! We live in a duplex with our good friends Marc and Kris, on a lovely piece of property out in the country with acres of hiking trails. It is basically paradise. In February, we went to Ottawa for our annual Winterfest trip, but there was a warm spell so they closed the Ottawa canal (the world’s longest skating rink supposedly, although the Dutch might disagree). So since we couldn’t go skating and have poutine and Beaver Tails, we just went bowling (A note for the non-Canadians: Beaver Tails are fried dough and sugar, not actual tails from actual beavers). We were even joined by our niece Lindsay, who enjoyed bowling despite being nine months pregnant!

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Until just a few weeks ago, I had some hope that this Christmas letter would be significantly different from last year’s version, which looked back on the year that COVID-19 arrived and became a global pandemic (we found a Christmas ornament online that expressed our thoughts about 2020 — see if you can make out what it says). Before about mid-December, things were looking pretty good, relatively speaking: most people (the smart ones, anyway) had gotten not one but two shots of vaccine — in many cases, mRNA vaccines, which were developed faster than any other vaccine in human history. The rate of COVID growth had slowed in most places, hospitals were no longer overwhelmed, and Christmas looked like it might be something approaching normal.

Then we found out about the Omicron variant, which spreads somewhere between two and three times as rapidly as the Delta variant. International — and even local — travel suddenly became a gamble. If we’re double-vaxxed and boosted, does that mean we can still get together with family, or should we bail on Christmas yet again? With so many unknowns (is Omicron milder than Delta? Is this the beginning of the end, where we all get COVID but it doesn’t turn into anything serious and it gradually becomes just like the flu?) everyone has had to make their own personal choices — it’s like a roll of the dice, except you’re rolling at the same time you’re playing Russian roulette.

Last year, we wound up shelving our plans to have family at our place near Buckhorn for Christmas, and instead had a delicious meal and quiet evening with our next-door neighbours Marc and Kris. On Boxing Day, we wound up having a wonderful surprise visit from our oldest daughter Caitlin and her husband Wade, who called to say they were out for a walk and then showed up at the door, having driven all the way from Ancaster. We set up chairs and a propane fire-pit in the garage and had a charcuterie plate and some drinks, then went for a hike, and it was lovely. After things calmed down a bit, and we had gotten our first vaccine, we got together for a late Christmas at our place in March, and went for lots more hikes and skated on the pond and visited the neighbour’s sheep.

Some of you may be familiar with Primo, the lamb that Becky and I (and our youngest daughter Zoe) and Marc and Kris nursed back to health last spring as a COVID quarantine project, after he forgot how to walk due to what we think is a vitamin deficiency. This spring, we got a couple of new lambs, courtesy of our neighbour with a penchant for animal husbandry. We named them Butch & Sundance, after trying out multiple twin name combinations, like Peanut Butter & Jam, Archie & Jughead, etc. Last year’s twins are named Pebbles and Bam-Bam (their mom was Wilma of course — she has passed on to her eternal reward) and Primo’s brothers are Dopey and Big Red. And then there’s Blue Ivy, whose mom we named Beyonce because she had curly hair that hung in her eyes (ironically, she has the least-musical bleat of any of the sheep).

Unlike Primo, our new twins came out March 9th and seemed healthier within hours than Primo seemed days or even weeks after being born. Butch and Sundance were walking around within minutes, jumping within days, and after a week or so were doing acrobatic jumps by using their mom as a jumping-off point — springing up onto her back and then kicking themselves into the air from there. They have probably tripled in size by this point, and we have even convinced them to accept crackers and other snacks from our hands — Sundance even figured out how to get his entire head out through the gaps in the wire fence, so his mom wouldn’t keep grabbing all the good snacks. Clearly he is a genius.

Every year when I write our Christmas letter, I’m aware of how much it seems like bragging: Oh yes, here are our photos from Venice or Florence or the Amalfi Coast, and here are pictures of our brilliant and beautiful children, and Becky and I looking happy and prosperous. Isn’t our life wonderful and idyllic? This year, of course, there wasn’t any of that. Not only was there no trip to Italy, but there were virtually no trips anywhere to speak of, apart from a journey to Florida in March, just as the terrible reality of COVID-19 was starting to hit (here’s a link to a blog post I’ve been updating periodically since the pandemic began). To be honest, even writing the words “there was no trip to Italy” sounds ridiculous, like I’m a prince of some nameless country whose citizens are all dying of the plague, and I’m complaining that I can’t go stag hunting because of the quarantine. Any lingering sadness about not being able to see Italy in the spring was quickly overtaken by gratitude that we were all healthy. Memories of all the lovely churches in Italy were replaced with images of them filling up with coffins because people were dying faster than they could be buried.

The trips that we did make this year, to see friends and family, or to move Becky’s mom out of her condo after the death of her husband Ron, were fraught with anxiety: Should we go inside? Will everyone be wearing masks, or do some not want to do that, and if so then what do we do? How long do we stay? Can we eat outside, and if not, then what? Should we wash all the food with hand soap, and all the door handles, and the boxes and bags everything came in? This year was like trying to navigate a ship through iceberg-infested waters, except all the icebergs were invisible and the throttle was stuck wide open, and everyone was blindfolded. Every day, there was a terrible new milestone: A record number of cases, a record number of deaths, a record shortage of ICU beds. Amid all this, we have been very lucky: we moved out of Toronto last year, and are sharing a large house (really two houses put together) just north of Peterborough. We have about a hundred acres of fields and forest to wander around in, and friends next door to have dinners with. We can go months without going anywhere, other than the odd trip to the grocery store (and the liquor store, of course).

I’ve been reading a series of newsletter entries over the past few months called “The Last Normal Day,” and it got me thinking about our last normal day, sometime in early March. Becky and I went to Florida with her brother Dave and his wife Jennifer, where we had rented a condo complex near Siesta Key. When we flew down, there were warnings about washing your hands so as not to get this new flu, etc., but it seemed like mostly a nuisance. With each passing day, however, it got more real, and more frightening. One day we were kayaking through the mangroves, and the next we were frantically trying to book new return flights for Becky’s mom and stepfather because Canada was closing the border. Our last meal there, we joked half-heartedly about taking a photo with empty tables beside us, so our daughter Caitlin and her husband Wade (both of whom are nurses), wouldn’t be mad at us for breaching COVID rules. And then not long after we came back, Meaghan had to take our cat Shadow to the vet, and we all got on a video call as she passed away in Meaghan’s arms (little did we know that most of 2020 would be spent on video calls).

In a novel he wrote in 1863, entitled “Paris In The Twentieth Century,” science-fiction pioneer Jules Verne described a city with a network of electric lights, gas-powered automobiles, wind power, machines that transmit text and photos across long distances, high-speed trains that run on magnetic levitation, and computerized weapon systems. The central character of the story is Michel Dufrénoy, who graduates in 1960 with a major in literature and the classics, but finds they have been forgotten in a futuristic world where only business and technology are valued (he eventually dies after a famine and nuclear winter-style disaster wipes out most of France). Verne’s publisher refused to publish the book because he thought it was too dystopian and would ruin the author’s career, and the writer locked it in a safe, where it was forgotten until one of Verne’s great-grandsons found it. It was eventually published in 1994.

Usually I start these things by talking about the weather — except for last year, of course, when the big news was the wedding of our daughter Caitlin and her husband Wade. This year there is some news, but possibly not quite as big, or at least big in a different way: Becky and I have moved out of our house in Toronto and into a new home near Buckhorn (which seems like such a quintessentially Canadian name, but is also very popular in other parts of the world). It’s just northeast of Peterborough, which in turn is northeast of Toronto. This home has an interesting feature, which is that it’s attached to another home, one belonging to our old friends Marc and Kris (old meaning we’ve known them a long time, not old as in aged).

If you’ve seen any of these letters, you’ve probably seen a mention of the Farm, where we usually go for New Year’s and other visits during the year, sometimes with a large group of friends from our university days. So the Farm is where we are living now — this is a recent picture of it. It’s actually two distinct houses put together, with a large atrium in between, and the basements are connected. We live on the right-hand side. Kris’s mother used to live there until earlier in 2019, when she moved into a retirement home — and since we were planning to move out of our four-bedroom house in Toronto now the kids are gone, we decided to take over the house.

This was not an easy process, as anyone who has moved out of a house they have lived in for decades with multiple kids can attest — it involved countless trips to dumps and the Salvation Army and other similar places, plus a five-ton dumpster living in our driveway for weeks, and endless journeys up and down stairs with boxes. At this point, we are more or less moved in, but still have no idea where some things are, and the garage will barely fit a car because there are so many boxes of “treasured belongings,” otherwise known as stuff we haven’t figured out what to do with yet (we have a shipping container as well). But it is lovely living out in the country on a large chunk of land with woods and hiking trails, and it is two hours closer to the family cottage, which is also a plus.

The girls are also doing well — Caitlin is busy being a nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit at McMaster in Hamilton, and Zoe and Meaghan are living together in Kingston, where Zoe is about to graduate from Queen’s with an honours degree in psychology and Meaghan is working at Best Buy. 

In what seems to have become a pattern for Toronto at Christmas, I am writing this surrounded by green grass and not a trace of snow, and temperatures are in the 5 degree Celsius range (any Americans reading this will have to do the translation into Fahrenheit themselves — I think it’s multiply by 2.1341 and then add the square root of 11). It’s quite nice not to have to shovel, and to only have to put on a light jacket when going out, but it also feels a little odd, and somewhat disturbing. I mean, I love the personal effects of global climate change, but I can’t really enjoy them fully because I’m worried about all the ways it could go wrong for the planet and life as we know it. 

In any case, on to the letter! As usual, I will focus on the great events of this year and skim over (or ignore completely) the not-so-great ones, like multiple car accidents (everyone is fine! Our insurance didn’t even go up!). If everything works properly, the links below should open in a new window — and if you want to go and look at the photos afterwards, you can find them in a Flickr slideshow. You can also find larger versions of all of them, along with a whole bunch more pictures that I haven’t included here, at the Ingram Family Photo Library (unless my server is down, in which case I apologize). If you have any questions about the letter or just about the Ingram family in general, my email is [email protected] — unless of course you have a criticism to make about this letter, in which case please feel free to use the email [email protected].

As some of you may remember from last year’s letter, this year started off very differently compared to every other year. Usually we get together at Marc & Kris’s farm near Buckhorn for New Year’s, but this time we were all in a ballroom at the Stone Mill Inn in St. Catherines, toasting the marriage of our eldest, Caitlin, to a wonderful young man named Wade Hemrica. It was a great wedding, with beautiful bridesmaids and great food and a lot of good friends and family gathered, and of course there were hilarious and touching speeches from the bride and groom’s parents, which Becky and I managed to get through without too much trouble. Caitlin also convinced me to record myself singing and playing “Blackbird” by Paul McCartney, and then played that as the music for our father-daughter dance, which was pretty special. I may have had something in my eye at one point, but made it to the end without too much blubbering. 

It’s hard to believe that two people as youthful as Becky and I could have a daughter as beautiful and accomplished as Caitlin, but there you have it. And despite the fact that I don’t drink, I had nine-and-a-half shots of tequila with various family members and still managed to remain vertical for most of the evening! All in all it was a terrific party, and a great way to ring in the New Year. I told Caitlin and Wade it was so much fun that we should do it every year, but somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen.

I would like to start off by apologizing to all the devoted readers of the annual Ingram Family Christmas Letter (you know who you are) who may have noticed that they didn’t get one this year. That’s because I — as the sole editor and publisher of said letter — decided to hold the presses for some breaking news: Namely, the New Year’s Eve wedding of our oldest daughter, Caitlin Lee. If you have any complaints about this decision, please forward them to this address: [email protected].

Describing Caitlin’s wedding as breaking news might be a bit of an exaggeration — after all, we knew that it was coming ever since they got engaged last November. We were all overjoyed at this news, because her fiance turned husband Wade is a terrific guy, a fellow nurse who fits Caitlin to a T and is also a great co-parent to my favourite grandson, a Border Collie named Kip who joined their family in 2017. The three of them took some amazing engagement photos in the fall. Caitlin and Wade met after a mutual friend introduced them, and we all knew they were fated to be together when Caitlin started a quote from Lord of the Rings about potatoes, and Wade completed it with “boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew.”

The couple planned the entire wedding themselves (with some valuable and much-appreciated advice from their parents, of course) and it went off without a hitch. It was held at a historic paper mill turned boutique hotel in St. Catherines, Ontario called the Stone Mill Inn that has a big sweeping staircase where they took most of their pictures. Also, through a weird coincidence, Caitlin’s dress came from the Rebecca Ingram line of wedding designs, because that’s the designer’s daughter’s name.

The year started with beaver tails and maple taffy and general merriment at Winterlude in Ottawa, and then we headed off to resort in the Dominican, on the south side of the Samana peninsula, across from Punta Cana. There were tiki umbrellas and breakfast by the beach, which most of the time we had all to ourselves. Some days we even got some chairs on the beach, although most days they were “reserved” by people who got up at 7 am and put their towels on them with clips, which you definitely were not supposed to do but everybody did :-(. The resort had some great pools. and some leaning palm trees and some great specialty restaurants (which cost extra of course). And we did a fun horse ride on a trail through the forest to a waterfall.

We also went on a whale-watching tour, and while we only saw flashes of whales we got to sit up on top just a few of us, which was nice because people were apparently being violently ill down below 🙂 And we did a zip line through the jungle, which Becky did with her usual panache. We also took a bus tour out to a beach with some tree forts that you could rent apparently. No sooner were we back in Toronto but it was time to head off to Perugia in Italy for the journalism festival that we’ve been going to for a couple of years now. Never get tired of the view from the Brufani Palace hotel in the old city, and the amazing venues for the conference, some of which are buildings that date back to the 11th century (the Sala dei Priori was built before Gutenberg invented the printing press). We also joined a few friends on a cab ride to Assisi, where we toured the basilica again and hiked the amazingly tilted hills of that old town.

We started the year with our usual trek up to The Farm near Peterborough, which had turned into a winter wonderland, so we scraped the pond and did some skating. We had the usual feast of gourmet creations, including an awesome turkey dinner with Zoe’s friend Jade and Kris and Marc’s niece Becca and Stephanie and our friends Barb and Lori, and my famous yin-yang caviar pie, which I stole from Marc and Kris. Back in Toronto, Meaghan premiered her cool new hairdo and Zoe performed in her school’s presentation of the play Legally Blonde, playing the sarcastic lesbian character 🙂

I got a cool email from my friend Rob Hyndman in which his dad Bob — who flew with my father in German — shared photos from a famous incident in which my dad tried to help steer a fighter jet and it wound up skidding off the runway and into a field (something about the front steering wheel control being different than he was used to). We went to Orangeville for one of Zoe’s hockey games and the hockey dads had an impromptu cookout in the parking lot, with condiments on a foldout ironing board.

Soon it was Winterlude time, with skating on the canal and poutine and beaver tails, and it turned into a bit of a whiteout at one point. Ottawa even has these cool new enclosures where you can put your skates on without freezing to death, which is nice. Unfortunately, 2015 saw some bad news as well — I and the rest of the writers at Gigaom were told in March that the company had essentially run out of money, and the funders didn’t want to put any more in, so it was closing immediately. It was a pretty big shcok — I had been talking to Om Malik, my friend and the founder, about a job offer from the Wall Street Journal and he never mentioned the possibility that Gigaom might shut down. After much deliberation, I decided to turn down the job with the Wall Street Journal (they wanted me to move to San Francisco) and accepted a job with Fortune magazine. Onward!

Putting all of that behind me, we put winter behind us as well and headed south, where we did a swamp tour of the Everglades, complete with alligators (which our guide called over and fed by hand) and some of the group got to put their feet in the sand near Miami Beach — I had to wait with the car so we didn’t get towed 🙂 We spent the night in a tiny apartment where we somehow crammed all seven of us into bunkbeds, and then it was off on a cruise with lots of pools and hot tubs and our own little balcony.

My name is Mathew Ingram, and I’ve spent the majority of my career working for newspapers — including about 15 years at one of Canada’s national newspapers, where I was a reporter, editor and columnist and wrote about everything from the stock market to the oil industry. After being asked to join the paper’s online group, I started writing on the Internet, started a blog and began writing about technology, and eventually I left and joined an online media company based in San Francisco called Gigaom. We covered technology fairly intensively, from cellphones to new kinds of Internet services, Facebook, etc. And my specialty was the disruption and transformation of the media industry.

If any of you are familiar with the name Gigaom or have Googled it recently, you may know that the company shut down recently, after eight years, and so I guess in a sense we were also disrupted, in much the same way as many traditional media entities have been. I’m happy to talk more about that after the presentation if anyone wants to.

So let’s get started — some of you might be familiar with a lot of what I’m talking about but others may not, so I’m going to try and go slowly enough that we cover all the bases, but quickly enough that no one who already gets all of this winds up being bored to tears. I don’t want to spend too much time on my presentation, because for me presentations are just a way of jump-starting a discussion, and so I want to get to that as quickly as possible. And at any point, if anyone has a question, feel free to just put up your hand and wave or jump up and down or do something to catch my attention.

Note: This is the text of a presentation I gave in 2015 to a journalism conference

As so many of our years have, we started 2014 with a New Year’s celebration at our friends Marc and Kris’s place — known as The Farm — near Buckhorn just north of Peterborough, where we scraped the pond clear and did some skating and also went for some snowshoe hikes through the woods on the property. After that we met up with Becky’s brother Dave in Port Hope for a hockey tournament, where his team was playing Zoe’s team — it was a lot of fun, except for the fact that Zoe’s team got completely annihilated 🙂 Becky and I also took some time off for a little relaxation at the Scandinave spa in Collingwood, near Blue Mountain, which offers massages and has a sauna and steam room and a half a dozen or so pools of varying temperatures. It was fantastic.

We also visited Ottawa for our annual Winterlude trip, where we pretend to skate on the canal in order to justify the eating of several pounds of poutine and beaver tails and maybe some maple taffy, which they make by pouring the syrup into cold snow and then wrapping it around a stick. I made a quick trip to Boston for a conference, where I paid a ceremonial visit to Boston Common and of course to Hahvahd yahd. It’s not quite the same, but I had a great time at a conference at the University of Toronto as well, which has some cool old buildings too. And soon it was time for our annual trip away from the snow to Florida, where we visited Becky’s mom and her new husband at their place in Port St. Lucie on the Atlantic ocean side of Florida.

We made the obligatory trip to our favourite beach, the white beach at Siesta Key and watched some sunsets from the south jetty in Venice, and took the kids to Busch Gardens to see the alligators and ride some coasters and eat too much junk food. We also went to Pop’s Sunset Grill down by the intercoastal waterway near Nokomis, where you can eat at a fire table. And of course we had Zoe’s birthday, as we usually do when we’re in Florida, and went bowling. After we got back, I went to New York for a conference that we put on at Pier 50 (which I found out is where the Titanic was supposed to dock if it had finished its voyage). I visited some of my favourite places, including Central Park and the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park and the New York Public Library near Bryant Park, where I like to work in the periodicals room.