Mailbag: Better Late than Never!

Dear Doug and Jennifer,

We’ve been waiting and waiting. Where’s the Flanders Family update? Are you guys ever going to write one this year?

That’s a question we’ve been fielding all month long from the folks who know we normally mail our Christmas letters the day before Thanksgiving and are now wondering whether we might’ve dropped them from our mailing list.

The answer is yes, we did write our annual update, and no, we didn’t drop anybody from our list — we’ve just been extra slow getting them in the mail this year.

Part of the problem was that the photo — a family shot from David’s October wedding — wasn’t ready in time for us to assemble the cards while kids were all home for Thanksgiving, so they requested we wait until school let out for Christmas break before staging our Christmas card assembly line.

But then we spent a week in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where we were interviewed by Al Jazeera’s America Tonight for a story on big, “quiverfull” families. (That report hasn’t aired yet, but I’ll be sure to post a link when it does.)

Then Mom came down with a horrific case of strep throat and slept about 60 hours straight. And then there were all those costumes to get ready for screening the new Star Wars movie:

But the assembly line finally happened tonight. The cards will be in the mail tomorrow and will still (hopefully) arrive before Christmas.

I’m planning to post this year’s letter on the blog here on Christmas Day, along with lots of family photos. Meanwhile, I’ve been busily updating our About Us pages, a task that hadn’t been done in five or six years.

Until this week, if you clicked on a photo of Samuel, for instance, you’d see a kid in braces who was just starting dual credit classes at the local junior college, when in reality, he is now 22 and in his third year of medical school.

I’ve added a few videos to the about us pages, too, so now you can see an overview of David and Bonnie’s wedding or watch Benjamin do some pretty impressive stunts off the diving board.

I’m a little over halfway through those updates, but I will hopefully finish the younger six kids’ pages in the next day or two.

Meanwhile, we’ve only a few more days until Christmas. Make them count!