Dear Ones,

Merry Christmas from the Bennie Bunch!

Thanks for making it to the recession-friendly online version of our Christmas letter. One endearing thing about the environmental consciousness becoming more and more mainstream is that where I was once cheap, I now am a hip shade of green. That said, we acknowledge that a downside to electrifying our erstwhile paper Christmas letter is that it complicates reading it in the loo.

(Are you still there? Surprising, that is. But pleasantly so.)

As I write, our girls are in bed in their new doll-matching jammies and Rachelle is conked out after a day singing Here With Us for both services at church and then hosting Christmas Eve for the family. (She is a beast...and a beautiful one.) We're on the good side of Christmas now, so if my tone is any brighter than in the postcard, that's why. (If not, it'll be brighter by Boxing Day, which by my calculations was right about when the Grinch came around.) We hope you're enjoying peace, delight and joy that are bigger and braver than all your perfectly valid reasons for stress.

This year, that's been our goal...met with some small success. In the postcard, we summed up the seasons of 2011. Here's just a little more:

Winter:

• What winter? We missed our mile-high mountain house, but worked on making our new house in Blowmont (midway between Loma Linda and Palm Springs) feel like home.
• The girls' first January down the hill brought them three little bundles of love and stench: a new kitten and the first two new guinea pigs. 
• From before Christmas and into spring, the five of us were practicing for our church's Easter pageant, which featured the girls as excruciatingly cute Bunny (Brielle) and Flowers (Melia and Ashlyn), Mike in an anemic homegrown beard and sweet white blouse as Christ, and Rachelle melting hearts with her vocals. It was a hoot, and a rather beautiful Lenten pilgrimage too.
• A new phase of the journey with our fellowship of friends in Oak Glen began. A monthly house church gathering with a particularly transformational twist, this group of amazing people is supporting us in being who we want to be in God's good world. We are grateful!
• We got a new baby cousin! Mike's brother, Scott, and wife, Katrina, opened their hearts and ours to lovely little Violet Hope, red-headed like her mommy, and certainly smarter than her daddy. Yay!

Spring:

• The guinea pigs brought so much love that presently we had six, and thanks to the miracle of compounding interest, our cup soon overflowed with furry, chittering rodents. This led us to learn (from YouTube, bless it) the life skill of sexing and separating guinea pigs. 
• Easter was a busy blast with 3 performances of Once Upon an Eternity, our Easter pageant, based on John Eldredge's great little book, Epic. (Easter 2010 had been moving day.)
• Mike got the birthday present of his life on May 4 when Rachelle's brother, Marcus, and his wife, Alyson, gave him his first nephew, Donavan. He rocks.
• Brielle turned 8 in June and planned an impressive sewing/pizza-making/movie night/camping sleepover party for a host of giggly girls, and the few boys brave enough to hang.

Summer:

• VBS is too much fun to do only once--so our girls did it thrice, once with us helping lead.
• Everybody's swimming now, so we hit our HOA pool as often as possible.
• We stayed at Lake Tahoe in a house nearly as wonderful as our friends, Amy Beth and Alan, who scored it and shared it with us. (Why have we not gone there sooner?) Especially after last winter's formidable snow pack, the views were epic. While there, we celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary with a dinner cruise. 
• We hung out with book club buds in a beautiful pool in Valley Center (northeast of Escondido), with occasional visits to the equally beautiful house that sat near it to discuss the year's picks: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. 
• Rachelle's aunts, Laura and Lisa, and their husbands flew in from North Carolina and to sweat out a week in the desert. Lucky us to have them here on the west side!
• Mike went back to school in mid-July, earlier than ever, but for reasons near to his heart: equipping student leaders to support and mentor incoming 9th graders in his school's new Link Crew program.
• Rachelle completed the WorldWorks Leadership Practice as OC98, the culmination of a transformational, experiential, educational journey that began back in January. She has discovered peace, confidence and power to consistently be her loving, true self. We missed her through the many rigorous weekend workshops, and are proud of her for her courage, perseverance and passion to grow as a soul and as a leader.
• Mike and a dozen friends from his Orangewood Academy Class of 1991 reunited in Orange County two decades after graduation. The most striking thing--besides how great it felt to be together--was how little [we thought] we'd changed. We'll see how that trend holds up in 20 more years.

Fall (and late summer, since the school year slides back each year with the gloomy persistence of a thirty-something's hairline):

• Mesa Grande Academy saw Brielle hit 3rd grade and the twins enter 1st. It's year 2 at MGA, and while there is still nostalgia for their beloved Redlands Adventist Academy homegirls, they are doing great at the "new" school that is like home for us. (Mike taught there 1998-2004.)
• Rachelle started her new gig (familiar though that may sound) working for Beaver Medical Group's outpatient therapy center in Redlands. She loves it--the team of colleagues, the structure, the support staff, having an office that is not on four wheels, the eager-to-progress patients. And her patients love her, getting as much healing for the soul as for the body from their time with her.
• We officially became soccer parents, with all three girls playing for Orange Crush in TCYSO. They dug it, looked way cute in the process, and learned lots about the game and how to win (mostly) and lose (only once) gracefully. Coaches Bret and Armando were awesome!
• The twins celebrated their 7th birthday at a princess tea party that would've needed gallons of espresso to dampen its sweetness. (We celebrated it like 78 other times too with various friends, family, classmates, restaurant servers and assorted kind strangers. My girls want to party all the time.)
• We indulged in another of our semi-annual marriage retreats with Sacred Hearts, which always bring grace, refreshment and a hint of sanity right when we need it (or soon thereafter).
• The girls rocked the house in the church children's choir, in school renditions of the Pilgrim story and Chicken Little, and in a rap they busted with the King's Kids, a children's ministry drama team that Rachelle's Auntie Bernadine leads. (Hams like their mother, those little ones.)
• All five of us assisted with Operation Chad, a nature retreat on the Ventura coast for inner city youth. More such adventures to come with Auntie Bernadine's newly launched Freedom to Be: The George Irwin Foundation.
• Thankfulness reigned in November with Turkey Day gatherings on both sides of the family, both of which are blessedly local.
• With the rodent count down to one (which is a long, tearful story, not good for Christmas morning), the girls brought home a soft, white kitten named Snowball (inverse relationship of guinea pig population to feline population purely coincidental). Her puppy-like snuggliness has us purring our way through Christmas break about as much as the cat.

(OK, so another drawback to the digitization of the yuletide epistle is that I'm not limited to a single sheet of paper. This is turning into an exercise in TMI. But at least you don't have to bother recycling it when you've had quite enough.)

We'll end the way we did in the postcard, because we really, really mean it: This Christmas Day, we’re thanking God for YOU—Christ’s Christmas letter: “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You…are a letter from Christ…written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” (2 Cor. 3.2-3) Thank you for writing love into our lives by being who you are.

With love, laughter and prayers for an extraordinarily great 2012,
Mike, Rachelle, Brielle, Melía and Ashlyn Bennie