Dearest Friends, Family, and Random Blog Readers,

It’s time once again for our humble holiday newsletter from our house to yours! Hold onto your hats, people! We’ve had quite an eventful year, but I’ll try to make it brief!

Twenty-twenty began with the hubster and me fleeing the Covid-19 virus and the partisan antipathy of the Disunited States. It was really a toss up of what would kill us first so we decided to vamoose it to an uninhabited part of the Brazilian Rainforest.

Once in Brazil, we hopped a smaller plane and parachuted out into the wild blue yonder with our gear. Roughing it in the wild would be our biggest adventure yet.

I made quite a ruckus coming down through the canopy and managed to knock down a bee’s nest as big as me, but other than that, I made it pretty much unscathed. (My bad, bee friends, my bad).

The hubster was not so lucky, his parachute got stuck in a tree with him still strapped into it. As I began to shimmy up the tree with my handy knife between my teeth to cut him down, I noticed the tanned backend of a man running off into the forest. Fine by me. I had to save the hubster anyway, there was no time to make friends.

It took quite some time to get him out of the tree as he is afraid of heights. (So, you may ask, how did I get him to jump out of a small plane if he is afraid of heights? Simple. I pushed him. Okay? Desperate times call for desperate measures. Who wants to live alone in the middle of the rainforest? Am I right)?

Turns out I needn’t have worried about being alone. As we got to the ground, we turned to find a previously undiscovered indigenous tribe of people gathered around the huge bee’s nest which was oozing golden honey everywhere. Apparently honey is a delicacy in the rainforest, and me inadvertently knocking the humongous nest down was a very good thing.

These new people were the Kaca Daca tribe. They were seriously thrilled to meet us, and from what I could understand, they’d just made me their new Kaca Daca Queen.

Sidenote: At first we were not happy because the hubster and I had hoped to ditch our masks and have less handwashing and social distancing to do, but when you land in a tribe of previously uncontacted indigenous people, well … it is completely irresponsible to not wear a mask, wash frequently, and social distance. The Kaca Daca people didn’t mind. It just made us more magical and mysterious to them.

Anyway, we stayed for six months enjoying them and learning their ways until one day a drone flew over. It dropped a message informing us that our son and daughter-in-law had given birth to a baby boy and we needed to try to make our way back to civilization in America. We stole away in the middle of the night so the Kaca Daca people would not follow us and one month later we emerged from the rainforest.

Once back in Vermont, our phones started working and we were delighted to see we were grandparents to a Gerber baby replica, but sadly we also found the bank had foreclosed on our house and in addition, we had lost our castle in England. We had nowhere to go! What were we to do now?????

Well … I happened to have enough money to buy a single lottery ticket, and, as I am a very lucky person, we won 120 million dollars that very night. Ahhh. Twenty-twenty! What a year!

Being unable to visit our new grandson due to Covid restrictions and having lost our homes, we decided to move to Maine. We spent every penny of the lottery winnings on a boat and an old sardine factory on a remote island in Maine where we plan to make a new life. As soon as the hubster gets the hang of herring fishing, we’ll be all set. I’ve already packed four jars of sardines, which I will sell for 50$ a jar. This is probably the best business decision we’ve made in a long, long time.

I have become very popular with the local seabirds and wild turkey because what bird doesn’t love a woman who smells like salt and fish guts? Meet my new bestie.

Our eldest daughter started a home bakery business, mindy-cakes.com, and she has done outrageously well from the very get go. Every major network is clamoring to get her as a contestant on their baking shows and from what I am told she is now Duff Goldman’s new protégé.

The youngest daughter has become a world-renowned botanist. She has quite the green thumb and cultivates sweet plants of the non-smokable variety. If she is doing the smokable variety, she has failed to inform me.

Rupert is turning 13 and since moving to Maine is wearing camo outfits and refusing to budge from the fireside.

I haven’t given up writing and am working on the third book in the Rafe Ryder series. Progress was slowed with this amazing year of ours and because I can’t stop gawking at the fantastic trees in the woods up here.

Anyway, hopefully this letter has not made any of you feel bad or ridiculously inferior. We’ve just had a wonderful year! The stars were aligned for us!

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Diwali, Happy Kwanzaa, or whatever else you celebrate!

Love, Joy, and Peace!

All the best!

L. L.