Merry Christmas 2024 from the Holwicks

Dear friends, 

Celeste and I send you Christmas greetings from the beautiful coast of Maine.  We may not get as much snow as they did in the past but it is cold enough for us to enjoy our second-hand soapstone wood stove which weighs 470 pounds and we lugged it into the house by ourselves.  Wood is much cheaper than oil (free, actually) unless you count the manual labor involved.

We still enjoy big trips.  In February David visited Daniel’s mission school in Kenya while Celeste stayed home to babysit Kinsley.  In March we took our spring break and drove to Cape Coral, Florida, with our kayaks on top of the truck.  We spent a few days visiting Atlanta and appreciated its Craftsman-filled neighborhoods as well as the civil rights sites.  We also spent a day in Savannah on the way home.  Our biggest trip was taking our three oldest grandsons on a camping trip in June.  The Sight & Sound theater in Pennsylvania had a magnificent production of “Daniel” and the Ark in Kentucky wowed them.  The goal was Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave where we did around three long cave tours.

The rest of the summer we decided to stay home.  We were in good company as Weston and Kinsley decided a summer at Grandma’s House was more exciting than traditional summer camp.  We enjoyed hiking on the rocks at Ocean Point, pizza cookouts in the backyard, and shooting at the rifle range.  Weston also joined us on a driving tour to Nova Scotia with Celeste’s sister Sara and her friend Kristen.  We took the car ferry over and enjoyed whale watching, with up to four jumping at once.  We also toured the Fortress of Louisbourg and the miner’s museum on Cape Breton.  Celeste’s great-grandfather died in a coal mine explosion there.

August brought David’s 50^th high school reunion in Cleveland, Ohio, since the school in Heidelberg, Germany, is now closed.  We wanted to take a train but could not find decent connections so we took a Greyhound bus instead.  Big mistake.  Really really big.  We missed a good chunk of the reunion because of a failed connection in the bowels of New York City’s Port Authority terminal and on the way home we spent 20 hours sleeping on the floor of Pittsburgh’s bus terminal because a driver never showed up.  It was the kind of terminal where you have to ask for toilet paper because they lock it up to keep the homeless from taking it.  The trip did give us an appreciation for the indignities that the poor in America have to put up with.  The reunion itself was great and we enjoyed meeting up with old classmates like David Moran and Debbie Betts.

We have had other trips that were ministry related.  Three funerals followed in quick succession in New Jersey where our church is again without a pastor.  We also did a wedding in Ohio for our dear friend Ruth Brenneman’s granddaughter Evelyn and spent several days strolling through the streets and alleys of West Lafayette.  It has one less streetlight now but little else has changed since we left there in 1989.

We have had many opportunities to connect with our family this year.  Every second Friday we babysit for our daughter Sarah’s kids and we have attended many soccer and football games.  Their daughter Lennox is a real cutie and has just started to walk.  Sarah is now a reading specialist at her school.  Becca works two jobs and lives in a small apartment on the second floor with Tyree and Diana, who have visited us a lot.  Josiah and Julia came on Labor Day weekend; he recently had a job-related trip to Japan which is the country of my birth and which I would love to visit.

David continues to “woodchuck” and deliver firewood to needy families on our peninsula while Celeste has joined a new Alzheimer’s project in the area.  They are setting up a drop-in center and Celeste is organizing the nursing portion of it.  We both continue to work in our church.  Celeste does the Junior Church during the pastor’s sermon each and every week and we both help out with the midweek afterschool program for up to 14 kids.  They all love Celeste, of course.  She has a special gift for connecting spiritually with young people.

Our Christmas tree was growing in our backyard for 20 years but is now in our living room, all 11½ feet of it (I had to use a tall ladder to decorate it).  The wreaths are up, the holly is hung and we are ready for our celebration of our Savior’s birth.  May you have a wonderful Christmas as well!