Another year, another chirpy Family Christmas Letter from us, the lower-case fantastic four! But this wasn't just any year, this was 2020 [insert obligatory dumpster fire image here], which, as everyone knows, suuuuuuucked. Did 2020 get us down? Did 2020 make us frown? Oh, it tried, but you can't be sad for long when you're living with...
QUBIT!
Aside from occasionally masquerading as a sheep, Qubit behaves like a normal dog. Dogs are dogs, that's kind of the whole point. They aren't family members, they don't have intricate personalities, they're just animals who hang around underfoot, hoping you'll drop food. If you expected a paragraph about how cute and special and part of us this dog is, well, you're reading the wrong Christmas Letter. Go find one written about a dog named Quubs, or Q2, or QuberBoober. You're looking for someone whose pen name is WhoQueue, or The Qubinator, or, for some reason, Ms. Badoobs. When you find the story of that dog--Santa's Qubiest Little Helper--you'll know because it will ring Que.
TALIA
Convicted of wasting Qubit's entire training vocabulary on cute nicknames, Talia was sentenced to hard labor breaking rocks, no no no.... Talia was a wonderful person who adopted an elderly villager, painted a parking lot into a dance floor, volunteered at a food bank, sent postcards to hundreds of forgetful people reminding them to vote, and cooked dinner every god damn day of the last 365, so if she wants to buy some rocks then she gets to buy some rocks. And she did, literal tons of. Also rolls of native grasses, lots of small plants, and a fire pit, giving us a brand new backyard in which to place our rebuilt one-room school-from-home barn. Life saver.
FELIX
When not building cartoonishly oversized furniture, Felix is himself growing cartoonishly large. Those of us who have been sheltering in place with him don't notice this so much or even think to buy him new shoes, but if all you've seen of him this year is his disembodied head on Zoom, well, you're in for a surprise. When not away at school in the barn--Felix is majoring in something called "Bed Wars," we are so proud!--you will find him getting his mountain bike repaired (fortunately, in Marin, bike shops are considered essential services). In a major milestone, after somehow accumulating thousands of MTG cards Felix just the other day managed to sell one.
GIDEON
Gid--or, as he prefers to be called, "Rocketman"--had another busy year, which is to say he made a lot of work for other people, specifically us, his parents, who, as a supplement to what we thought was quite enough conversation on the topic, he invited to online surveys, two of them alone for his birthday party next May ("How did you hear about this event?" the surveywriter has the gall to ask). Gideon also conducted a persuasive grassroots campaign to evict Felix from the house, but was defeated in a recount. Salt in his wounds, he finds his teenage brother one cubicle over in the barn-we-call-a-school. Gid spends most of those school hours updating his profile picture (confusing both Google's vaunted surveillance AI and his fifth grade teacher) and trying to talk his classmates out of their lunch at a distance. In a worrisome first, our younger boy attempted to assert editorial control over the 2020 Family Christmas Letter, but not this year, young Padawan, not this year.
ALEC
Alec's proudest achievement of 2020 (possibly ever) was being crowned the King of Payne twice by a local, underplayed pinball machine. He has also been named the Imperator of Impeachment, the Bretwalda of Brexit, the Samrat of Shelter in Place, and the Fidalgo of Forest Fires, but never fear, peasant, We haven't let any of that go to Our head. When not reopening badminton courts, schools, and entire (very small) downtowns, Alec runs a thriving toothpaste import business for which he is the only customer.
THE VACATIONS
Let's not forget that Christmas Letter favorite, travel photos! 2020 put a stop to our globe trotting--that's OK, we were planning to reduce our carbon footprint anyway we tell ourselves--so we bought new sleeping bags and put California on heavy rotation. Radical!
Oh, more pictures? Yeah, we took a few, 'cause what else was there to do? Cue music and...
