Dear friends,

For the first time in my life, I will spend Christmas all alone. The kids will be in Colorado, Celeste will be working, and I will be opening everyone’s stockings. I guess this is a sign I am getting really old....

Some permanent changes have come to the Holwick family. Sarah graduated from Gordon College in May and with Rebecca moved out to Colorado. Finding a job wasn’t easy for Sarah (her first day at a child center, one of the precious children brought out his shiv) but she is now the director and teacher of an early intervention program for Spanish speaking kids in the Denver school system. I believe Sarah’s command of Spanish is limited to "si". Becca is going to a community college there and working as a swim instructor on the side. Both of them share a beautiful apartment in Aurora, complete with fireplace and high ceilings which they will have to heat this year.

Daniel ended up in Colorado for a different reason. He visited his girlfriend Cara at the Colorado Christian University out there during the summer and decided God was calling him to that school. Cara had nothing to do with it. He is starting as a psychology major but his real passion is leading worship at his local church and the college chapel . He is sending me pictures of all the neat places he has gone off-road with his Jeep. I think all those vacations out West must have put a bug in them.

Our baby Josiah is the only one left at home. All his skateboarding buddies hang around too so it doesn’t seem too lonely. This has been a great year for Josiah. He even made the Honor Roll! I substitute on occasion at the high school to keep an eye on him. It also allows me to catch up on my reading.

Celeste is working like a fiend, as usual. Lots of overtime this year, then she comes home and gets in her hot tub, followed by a half-hour in her new multi-thousand dollar leg massager machine to bring down her lymphoedema. She was motivated to work to pay for our week-long vacation in July in Riviera Maya, an all-inclusive resort on the Yucatan coast in Mexico. Lots of food, lots of swimming and snorkeling, and we even tubed with sting rays in a nature preserve. Saw the pyramids at Chicken Itza too. I was astounded that my family loved this cushy vacation, sipping milkshakes by the pool. I guess they’re not as tough as I thought.

We got back just in time for our church’s revival of an old tradition – The Peach Festival. It is a fund-raising event complete with food and a Pastor Dunking Booth. Some of the members paid big bucks to dunk me and they seemed to get a lot of enjoyment out of it. The highlight of my church year was participating in a baptism in the Atlantic Ocean on the Jersey shore.

This has not been a good year for our pets. Our dog Ollie was run over on the street in front of our house. Then on Halloween night I entered our dark house and was confronted by a black cat racing by me. I assumed it was our cat. Then our cat was run over on the street in front of our house and the black cat was still upstairs. Our neighbors asked if we had seen their cat "Loopy" anywhere and I said I think he is in our second floor. They came in, rooted through the mess up there, crying out "Loopy! Loopy!" The next day they found Loopy in their backyard. I still had a black cat upstairs, peeing all over the place. An animal trap finally caught him. We now have no animals in the house and don’t intend to get any more.

Not having pets will be handy for our next vacation, which will be a cross-country extravaganza with Celeste’s parents. We bought an RV on eBay from a nice couple in Indiana. Yep, I put down $10,600 for a vehicle I had never laid eyes on. It turned out to be a Class C beauty (that’s the small kind). Hopefully it can climb mountains, explore Yellowstone, and deliver us to Nephew Thad’s wedding in San Francisco.

We hope you have a truly blessed Christmas and feel Christ’s presence in your life this year!

Love,
David & Celeste and kids