Last night in a fit of industriousness I posted all my old Christmas letters on this website, so that they may be available to all for historical and research purposes. I even converted the three most recent ones to html (the others were carried over from the old website on ultranet). I don’t know about anybody else, but I still enjoy reading through them every so often just to see what was going on, who we saw, who was in and who was out from one year to the next. In the early days the Christmas letter was a way for people to check in with each other without having to actually be proactive about it. Over the years it started to influence events before they happened, as people would ponder how they would be represented before doing something. But lately I think people have stopped reading it, as hardly anyone seemed to notice when I didn’t send one this go-around. I should do a year in review anyway, just to fill in the gap between the last letter in 2001 and the start of this blog. The theory goes that from this point on if you want to know who’s hot and who’s not you’ll have to read it piecemeal here rather than waiting for the condensed version at Christmastime (assuming I can keep this going more than a week or two). Ironic for those who claimed not to have time to read a three page letter once every 12 months.