Our Christmas Card

This is the message I sent out as a Christmas card this year, accompanied by a family picture:

This letter is only going to those who think Kathryn married neither up nor down, just weird. The ones who think Kathryn married up will not get a letter because they would be confused, just as they were when they made that determination. The ones that think Kathryn married down will not get a letter because the less said by me, the better. Our pictures didn’t turn out so well, what with the Walmart special of putting black ink on blue background, which we then had to trace over, so I thought I’d make up for it by sending a letter. I also blame Walmart for the fact that my boys look wan and I look splotchy. At least the ladies look nice, as does the light fixture and the lamppost behind us. Oh, and the dove offering Henry some basil was a nice gesture. But that is really what our family looks like, and we also advocate peace, in all its fonts, so everything is accurate.

These are the updates for our family: We still live in Coralville, a suburb of Iowa City, right next to the Coral Ridge Mall, which has stores like Aeropostale, Panda Express, and Spencer’s Gifts to keep us really busy. At Spencer’s (we usually drop the “Gifts” part of the title in affection), we like to get posters for Maria and Henry’s room, like of Lady Gaga or Jonathan Taylor Thomas, but we also like their “fun” gifts, like the one that is a ceramic plumber with his pants low but it is also a mug. There is a kiosk right outside of the Spence’s (we sometimes drop the “r” as a family code word, like how we call McDonalds “Mickey-D’s”) that sells airbrushed grafitti shirts for cheap. We sometimes get those too, personalized with the written “The Lambert Family” starting in the front and written through the side of the shirt onto the back.

At Aeropotsotle, named for the righteous combination of Aristotle and Apostle, we like to get clothes for our active lifestyle. There we get woolen beanies and flannels for the chilly weather, and we get well-worn jeans for when I play football at the local park with my bros. Sometimes we get clothes just so that we can look good when we do things as a family, like go to Chili’s or Build-a-Bear. Of course, Aeropostotle is not the only clothing store at the Coral Ridge Mall, we also have Old Navy, which sometimes has  unequalled deals, and Target, a must-visit for every family. As Mark Twain said, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society,” so we get clothes.

Leaving the best to last, we often eat at Panda Express for some exotic Asian flavors. We LOVE the orange chicken, and I mean “we” as in all of us: we have really succeeded in getting our children to appreciate exotic flavors from around the world, including the places in Asia that Panda Express food comes from. A member of our ward recommended the Honey Almond Shrimp, so we tried that even though the shrimp is an extra $1.25 to the total bill, but it was well worth it. It is nice to know that even in Iowa we can enjoy the flavors of other peoples. As you can imagine, we eat well here, and if any of you would like to visit, we’d love to take you to some of our favorite restaurants, whether it is Panda Express, Subway, Sakura, or Orange Julius, all found within the Coral Ridge Mall.

Well, I’ve probably said enough about us, so we want to end by wishing you a Merry Christmas and a happy 2011. We hope to see you sometime between now and 2012, so please plan to come and visit. And we want to take this little time to recognize the importance and reverence of Christmas and other holidays, especially Black Friday after Thanksgiving, when people were lining up at 4:00 am to get into Best Buy! We know, because we watched out our window.