Saturday, December 20, 2014

2014 Layne Family Christmas Letter

 
The shopping is done, the presents wrapped and under the tree, and the cookies and bourbon for Santa placed carefully on the fireplace hearth.  All that’s left now are the looks of disappointment on the children’s faces when they awake to realize their Christmas dreams were over-anticipated and  undercapitalized.
Having survived the longest winter on record, it’s hard to believe we’re right back where we started last year, raking snow along with leaves and playing pond hockey before Thanksgiving. 
Living in Illinois is a challenge ill-suited for most.  Not so much because our state is run by corrupt politicians with no moral compass who are bereft of any shred of integrity and would gladly drive the state into financial ruin for their own selfish gain, but because this is where our children live.
The teen years are without question the most vulgar stage of human development save zygote, and why the wealthy send their children to boarding school.  To wit, Amanda is determined to find the dark cloud in every silver lining, and Ally wants to fight with anything that looks at her funny, including furniture.  It’s gotten so bad K & M would have moved if not for the likelihood that the girls might track them down and press charges.
 
Given the daily melodrama, K & M have learned to appreciate Taffy all the more.  Unburdened by human sentimentality, dogs have a litter, eat the stillborn and infirm, and then forget about the rest as soon as they’re weaned.  No wonder dogs are so carefree. 
 
Speaking of Taffy, unfazed by her eight inch, eleven pound stature, she has taken to stalking and attacking the herd of deer that empty our bird feeders at night.  Apparently convinced she’s a fully grown timber wolf, we last saw her disappearing into the night attached to the leg of an unaware buck.  
Just when K & M thought parenthood couldn’t get more thankless, Amanda began high school, much to her dismay as a lowly freshman.  Nowadays, high schools exist mainly as a place for society to store its teenagers until they’re old enough to be tried as adults.  Disappointed over the discontinuation of her nightly turn-down service, Amanda posted a scathing one-star review of her domestic accommodations on Yelp, rating the guest services as poor, the housekeeping and laundry inefficient and slow, and the concierge subpar.  She has threatened to take her business to the Four Seasons if service doesn’t drastically improve.  Against her better judgment, Karen routinely caves in to Amanda’s demands out of sympathy over her honors and AP teachers working her like a Chinese coal miner on seven day shifts.
Middle school has appealed to Ally so far.  How she has again managed to earn straight A’s in spite of belonging to concert and honor band, yearbook, chorus, earning a spot on the 6th/7th grade basketball team, and continuing to play travel softball is a puzzle.  K & M are pretty sure she’s using her lunch money to buy performance enhancing drugs.  Given her hectic schedule, she enjoys taking time to “chill” which she usually does on the toilet – iPod in one hand and iPad on her lap – like a technologically adept 60 year old man.  K & M have considered installing a fax line and Wi-Fi hotspot in the bathroom so she can be more productive on the job. 
As the girls get older and more informed of politics, family rule has sadly evolved from a dictatorship to a democracy whereby each person has a voice.  Because we are a two party system with equal membership in each, important family decisions are often deadlocked in an unbreakable stalemate with neither side willing to yield or compromise.  Such was the fate of Karen’s carefully planned summer vacation to Gettysburg which devolved into four days at Cedar Point in Ohio where Karen and Amanda ate funnel cakes and shopped while Ally and Mark rode every coaster in the park.  Mark still can’t turn his head to the left and Karen throws up just looking at the photo album.
In April, Mark dove back into self-employment with all the familial support of a Middle East military campaign.  Freed from the shackles of servitude, Mark now spends most of his time driving the girls places, walking Taffy, and unclogging toilets.  In a case of ultimate irony, Mark spent as much money restoring the lawn in September as he saved in weekly maintenance fees by killing it with Roundup in June.
 

 
  
In other football news, after a promising preseason, the Bears were decimated by injuries and forced to field a team consisting of a mediocre punter, three high school soccer players, the guy who drives the injury cart, and Jay Cutler’s mom.  The Illini proved once and for all why they deserve to be counted among the elite D-3 schools, winning just enough games to save their incompetent coach his job and get invited to an April 17 bowl game.
 
Though oft overshadowed by materialism and greed, it would seem the true purpose of Christmas is to remind mankind of what it means to be Christian, which according to American satirist Ambrose Bierce is “One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.”  Amen to that.
Merry Christmas to All, and to All Good Grief,
Karen, Mark, Amanda, Ally, and Taffy