December 25th Dave Wrote

Dear family --

'Twas the night before Christmas, and I suddenly realized that I'd not sent a letter on the 22nd which I assumed was my due date. But then I looked at the original schedule and noted that it ended with Mom on Dec. 15, so I guess I'm off the hook. Now it's Christmas Day. We had our Christmas Eve service at church and we've opened gifts with the boys. Sara, Terence, and Jordan hosted his family at their house this morning, so they will be coming over here later this afternoon. After we opened gifts this AM, I went over to the lab and walked around the orchards both to enjoy the land in winter and to see what work needs to be tackled after Christmas. I enjoy having "a farm" even if I don't own it.

Anyway, I wanted to wish you all a merry Christmas, even though I'll hopefully see all of you on Saturday.

Since various contributors have reviewed some family memories, I'll mention a few myself. I remember clearly some of the family visits that we made to Pop and Grammy Geissinger's when they still shared the old farm house with Isaac's family. As I recall, there were times when we would be there along with Isaac and Edna and Paul and Ruth and assorted children. If I was 8 or 9 years old at the time, then there must have been at least 10-12 kids when that group got together. Often we kids would play upstairs, but I also remember doing things like sliding head-first on our stomachs down the hardwood stairs that opened onto the living room. I remember that the evenings were often quite noisy. Only now, as a grandparent, am I beginning to realize how really noisy we must have been when we all got together in a small apartment! And how unappreciative we as kids were of the adults who all had to get up at 5 am to milk cows.

Similar get-togethers a few years later involved playing kick-the-tin-can in upstairs of the barn at night where the main floor of the barn was full of stored equipment, and only one or two 40-watt bulbs were available to light the area. All the do-gooder child protectors that prowl Christmas stores to pounce on unsafe toys would have gone nuts if they'd seen us running around over all that dangerous farm equipment in the semi-dark on a barn floor slippery with loose hay. Maybe if kids could still do exciting (and somewhat dangerous) things like that, they'd be less inclined to try drugs or alcohol as a way of finding excitement.

Talk about dangerous: How about giving two 13-yr-olds 22 rifles to go shooting rats in the barn as Bob Geissinger and I did. Also, I remember at age 16 or 17 collecting pigeons with Bob and Larry (and perhaps Bill and Ray ??) when we would knock them off their perches in the barn or silo at night and then collect them from the barn or silo floor and sell them for 50 cents to a dollar a piece at the Quakertown auction. I think hunters used them for target practice before small game season, and I've often wondered how many of them we re-sold for 2 or 3 weeks in a row! Anyway, climbing the outside of a 50-foot silo in the dark and using a 10-ft bamboo pole to knock pigeons off their perches around the inside of the metal roof was about all the excitement that I needed for a week. However, I couldn't come close to matching Larry's ability to climb around on the rafters in Isaac's barn.

I don't have that many specific memories of Christmas other than the Geissinger family Christmas dinners that eventually become so big that we would have to set up tables (big long tables) in at least 3 different rooms in Isaac and Edna's house. I always looked forward to the turkey filling (or stuffing, as my wife calls it). We certainly had a lot of good food!

Snow storms also bring back a lot of memories, but I'll save those for another time. Looks like there won't be a white Christmas this year.

I hope that all of you enjoy your Christmas and New Year holidays (holy days). We live in trying times, but God is still good!