Dear Family, Friends, and Winter Recreation Aficionados,
We would like to join SledMagazine.com in wishing you happy holidays and an exceptional season! As is our tradition, we also hope this letter finds you happy, healthy, and enjoying a restful and restorative holiday season with loved ones.
In case you haven’t been counting, we’re proud to announce that this is the 20th holiday letter that John has written. To celebrate this milestone and chart our progress, we’ll revisit a few items from Letters #1, #2, #3, … #19. Rest assured, however, that we’ll provide the fresh updates you’ve come to expect in this special edition, which we’re calling Letter #20. Let’s start with our home and work.
Our Home and Work
Back in the year of Letter #1, we had just become first-time homeowners. We’re still here in Yardley, PA, but our home has blossomed into one with…a new roof. Finally! Letter #1 also introduced our new jobs as psychology professors at The College of New Jersey (John) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ayelet). We’re now tenured and promoted, senior rather than junior colleagues in our departments. We don’t like to brag, but the success that we’ve attained in these jobs enabled us to replace the old roof.
Yep, as you can see, we also got state-of-the-art new gutters with that glorious new roof!
Child #1: Our First Child
We anticipated Child #1 in Letter #3, tentatively naming him Blasty when he was just an up-and-coming blastocyst…
Actual excerpt from Letter #3, back when life only took place in black and white.
By the time Blasty had matured into a fetus and then been born into our family in Letter #4, we had named him Max:
Photo from Letter #4 showing Max in full-color, inmate-style onesie!
Max is now 16 years old and taller than John, who is himself a full inch taller than the U.S. average for adult men. But this paragraph is about Max, now a junior in high school and keeping himself very busy. He’s taking AP Calculus along with a full slate of challenging honors courses this fall, with two more APs planned for the spring. He has become intimately familiar with the SAT and has started exploring colleges. While he’s still figuring out what he wants to do long term, he’s been especially interested in business, taking dual-enrollment courses in marketing, management, and business law, and competing through acronym-intensive programs such DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America) and FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America). He also attended an acronym (PFEW, the Pennsylvania Free Enterprise Week) this summer, where he enjoyed living on a college campus perhaps a bit more than the business simulations and guest speakers. Whatever Max chooses to study in college, we’re confident he’ll continue in the family business: completing his education, getting a job, and starting a family in another state.
Fun fact: Max likes gum. With his braces removed, his purchasing power has been unleashed on the gum producers of America.
If this year’s work is any indication, Max seems destined to work with second graders. Over the summer he was a full-time day-camp counselor (“Mr. Max”), leading games, supervising pool time, and shepherding kids on field trips. During the school year, he returned to Folkshul as a teaching assistant for the second/third-grade class and is now also volunteering as an assistant coach for—you guessed it—a second-grade basketball team. In his free time, Max enjoys music, friends, and anything athletic. Running has become his main school sport (spring track, cross-country, and now winter track), and he relishes both the challenge and the close-knit team community. He also plays intramural basketball, works out regularly at the gym, and continues to build an impressive home workout setup.
Max appears to be outpacing #302—who we assume is a premier athlete—with relative ease.
Child #2: Our Next Child
Long-time readers will know that Child #2 entered our lives in Letter #7:
You might recognize the inmate-esque sleeping garb from Letter #4, but we assure you that this is Child #2 as he appeared in Letter #7.
From the very first appearance of Child #2 in a holiday letter, we had named him Zach:
We believe this photo was taken around Halloween. In any event, it failed to secure Zach a modeling contract with Birds Eye or Green Giant.
Now 13 years old, Zach has officially reached five feet tall—which is not even close to John’s height, but once again this is not the place to let John steal focus. Despite standing outside in the pre-dawn cold to catch the bus, Zach continues to thrive at his private Quaker school, where he seems to dazzle his teachers. This year he’s working on a capstone project on the modern history and evolution of the guitar and is also taking Geometry remotely through the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. A major milestone this year was Zach’s Bar Mitzvah at Folkshul, our Secular Humanist Jewish Sunday school. He chose to study Jewish assimilation across history, spending a full year researching and writing under the guidance of his mentor, Dan Ascher. At the ceremony, Zach delivered a 45-minute presentation of his work to family and friends who traveled from five states to celebrate, making it an especially meaningful and memorable day.
You might recognize this suit from Letter #17. We’ve given this a snappy new look with a crisp white shirt, matching red tie and pocket square, plus an entirely different Bar Mitzvah boy!
Zach has also had an adventurous year outside the classroom. Over spring break, he traveled to Iceland with classmates on a science-focused trip that included glaciers, hot springs, caves, geysers, a lava lake, and even a volcano that thoughtfully erupted a week after they returned, presumably to avoid liability issues. As an eighth grader, he’s also participating in math competitions, the Investment Club, and the school musical. In his free time, Zach enjoys reading, video games, Lego builds, puzzles with Dad, caring for his upgraded aquarium, and playing guitar—now learning alongside John after his longtime teacher relocated. He remains a devoted Philadelphia Eagles fan and, together with Max, is currently demonstrating a worrying level of competence in outmaneuvering Dad and Papa in the family football betting pool.
Zach and classmates in Iceland, with helmets to protect against…well, we’re not sure what. The cold? Volcanos?
Ayelet: The Mother of Our Children
Ayelet continues her work as Professor of Psychology and Director of the Clinical Psychology Training Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She finds great satisfaction in her research and teaching, and especially enjoys mentoring the remarkably talented graduate and undergraduate students at Penn. Outside of work, Ayelet somehow manages to keep our family running smoothly, spending countless hours driving the boys to their many activities and serving as their cheerleader, organizer, supervisor, and proud spectator. One of the highlights of her week is our Saturday “family activity night,” when each of us takes a turn choosing a game or movie for the whole family to enjoy together.
Ayelet as she appeared in Letter #1. We didn’t have a color printer.
John: The Writer of 20 Holiday Letters
John’s year was anchored by a large-scale study of sports momentum with students in his research course. Their conclusion, counterintuitive to many fans, is that winning and losing streaks in major American sports are no more common or enduring than chance would predict, leading John to advise betting against “momentum.” Alongside the joys of teaching and research, he continues to enjoy his fish tanks, working on and playing his guitars, daily walks, and following Formula 1 and the NFL. John is especially eager to see what comes of the overachieving New England Patriots, who made things unexpectedly interesting during what was supposed to be a rebuilding year.
John as he appeared in Letter #1. He would willingly return to a cinder-block office if he could also have his hair back.
Holiday Letters Past, Present, and Future
This project has been quite a journey. Long-time readers might remember when they had to unfold pieces of paper that had arrived in envelopes to read our holiday letters. Back when it all started, with Letter #1, John had the thick, full head of hair shown above, could run significantly faster than he could walk, and had plenty of time to put together a quality letter well in advance of all major winter-season holidays. Ah, those were the days.
Ten years ago, we switched to an online format and digitized the archives. Letter #11 was still paginated, for some reason, with what can only be described as a senior-friendly font size. From Letter #12 onward, you could scroll blissfully through one continuous page of comfortably readable stuff. What wonders might the future bring? As the year that will be chronicled in Letter #21 approaches, John looks forward to trying something bold and exciting in his third decade of holiday letter-writing. Unless he’s short on time, in which case he’ll just phone it in as usual.
For now, though, that’s all for this year, from all of us to each of you!
You might recognize many of these trees from Letter #19, but they’re one year larger and sporting a new set of leaves.
