9 Villa Verde San Antonio, Texas 78230 December, 2004

Dear Family and Friends of Jean and Henry,

There was a time when luminarias were simple. You got yourself some paper lunch sacks, some candles and a load of sand. You put some sand in each of the sacks, and you stuck the candles in the sand. Then you lit the candles. ¡Mira, luminarias! When you were done looking at the luminarias, you dumped the sacks, sand, and candles in the trash.

No more. Now you’ve got to get special plastic holders and a string or two of Christmas lights, the kind that fit in the special plastic holders. Then you get yourself some colored plastic fake lunch sacks that fit over the special holders. Ordinary paper sacks don’t fit, by the way.  You also need some rocks to weight the fake sacks so the wind doesn’t blow them over. Sand won’t work because the fake sacks don’t have any bottoms. You put the lights in the special holders and the fake plastic sacks over the holders, and then you plug the lights in. ¡Mira, fake luminarias!

All is well and good, until Year 2. On Boxing Day of Year 2, you carefully put the fake luminarias in a box. (That’s why it’s called “Boxing Day.”) You make sure that the string of lights doesn’t get tangled as you box your fake luminarias. But, when you unpack the box in December of Year 2, you find that the fake luminarias have been occupied with the perverse activity of entangling themselves in their cord(s).  If you have two strings, you find them mated, of course. You can untangle the first fake luminaria with little difficulty. The second isn’t so easy. By the time you get to the last three you’re close to lunacy.

There was a time, in the ‘70s, when outdoor Christmas decorations of the electric type were considered garish, tacky, and wasteful of the planet’s resources. Those were the good old days.

Now, you may be asking, “Doesn’t Henry have anything better to put in his impersonal Christmas form letter than an essay on luminarias?”

Speaking of Christmas, I read in the paper that one Manuel Zamorano of Sacramento, California is boycotting Macy’s because they won’t wish him (or any of their customers) “Merry Christmas,”[1] opting instead for “Happy Holidays,” or “Season’s Greetings,” or something of that sort. There’s peace and good will for you. “Wish me a Merry Christmas, or I busta you face.”

But I digress. Back to the luminarias. This year has been rather stressful for the San Antonio Halffs.

Not that there weren’t some good times. In February, we went off to Club Med at the Turks and Caicos Islands. The Turks and Caicos is a leader in the booming foreign tax shelter industry. Unfortunately, most of islanders, lacking degrees in finance, are unable to share in the bounty that this industry brings to the islands. Club Med, of course, isolates its gentils membres (French for “Canadian snowbird”) from any contact with the local culture. So, we hung out on the beach for a week or so. It was good.

Then, in April, we took a train trip across Canada (Vancouver to Toronto) in the company of two great Texas music groups and one group from Nashville. To wit, Tom Russell and Andrew Hardin; Tom is from El Paso and Andrew is from Wimberly. (You’ve probably never heard of Wimberly, and that’s just fine with the folks from Wimberly.) Tom is an inspired singer-songwriter and Andrew plays the guitar. The Hot Club of Cowtown is an Austin band—fiddle, guitar, and upright bass—that plays swing, jazz, and tin-pan-alley. From Nashville, Kristi Rose and Fats Kaplan. They play Nashville stuff, but not bad Nashville stuff. Fats is as thin as a javelina at the end of a long drought, but Kristi is not. Maybe she used to be called Fats and they decided to exchange names because folks could not get used to the idea calling a guy Kristi. Back to the train ride. We spent a day or so in Vancouver, then, for three days we watched the scenery during the day and listened to music late into the night.[2] Then we spent a day or two in Toronto at the end of the ride. We did not get SARS.

Finally, in September, Larry went with us on a cruise that started in Athens; bumped into Nauplion, Santorini, Corfu, Korçula, Dubrovnik, Trieste, and Ancona; and landed us in Venice. We drove to Florence and spent three days there before flying home. We had a grand time even though Henry could not get permission to swim in the Olympic pool in Athens. I guess Michael Phelps’ records for that pool are safe.[3]

Speaking of swimming, 2004 was not a bad year for the ex-runner in the family. He swam in 42 events during the year, the longest of which was a 10K, completed in 3-1/2 hours. (The shortest was 50 yards, completed on 33.69 seconds.) The Woody Allen technique[4] continues to work well for him. In only two events did he place lower than third in his age group, and he qualified for eight events in next year’s National Senior Games.

But, for us, the year was dominated by events in San Diego, home of Henry’s aged parents. His mother, Lee, became weaker and weaker (both mentally and physically) and passed away peacefully on November 4. We loved her, and we miss her. Beyond that, there is not much to say, especially in an impersonal Christmas form letter. What else can be said will probably be said, better than I can say it, in Henry’s brother Bro’s Christmas letter, which, like ours, is only loosely tied to the calendar.

Henry spent much of the year, Jean somewhat less, shuttling back and forth to San Diego to check on the situation, which was complicated when Albert, Henry’s dad fell and broke his hip in August. Bro, who lives in San Diego, was conveniently away on vacation, and Henry, in an all too common failure of common sense, told him, “Everything’s under control here. Have a good time on your vacation and don’t worry about us.” Dad spent a couple of weeks après la chute in the hospital and under the influence of the world’s most powerful mind-altering drugs. The situation might have been manageable had he not had his cell phone with him. He called Jean in San Antonio and told her that he needed to go to the bathroom. He left a couple of messages on Henry’s mobile voicemail informing him that the situation was “bleak, very bleak.” He called his firm, Halff Associates, in Dallas and asked them for a new hearing-aid battery. He left a voice message on our voicemail consisting of the single exclamation, “Dammit!” You get the picture.

Dad’s doctor in the hospital was a real fan of drugs. He was released with a monster set of prescriptions that damn near killed him. We had to check him back in the hospital just to get permission to take him off the drugs that they put him on in the first place and that were killing him.

But he’s out of the hospital now, he has stopped making bizarre cell-phone calls, and his hip is healing. His spirit is another matter. You don’t lose someone you’ve been in love with for 64 years without a lot of pain.

But, we were talking about luminarias, weren’t we? I said to myself, as I looked at our luminarias—each nestled in its special holder, its electric light shining through the fake plastic lunch sack—that life must be pretty good if the worst thing you have to whine about is inappropriate Christmas lighting technology.

So we say, “Put some luminarias down your front walk. Pop the cork on some Nouveau Beaujolais. Put Tish or maybe The Spankers on the CD player.[5] Sing, dance, and let’s keep the season going as long as we can.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
 “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, 1864