Heiss Holiday Humbug 2025

This poor poem stayed on the back burner far longer than it should have (and we haven't even managed to take family pictures yet), but all of my kids are under one roof and we're living life—it's busy and messy and beautiful.

I started putting all the Christmas cards and letters we've been collecting up on the wall. It's nice when I'm ready to do that as they begin arriving, but I have to admit that it was a bit of a thrill to get to put them all up at once—we have so many wonderful family and friends flung far and wide. We're really quite lucky!

The visual theme of this year's newsletter is brought to you by a collection of about 200 pictures Phoebe took of our living room carpet with my phone the other day. It adds to the general theme of chaos of the newsletter (and our life), I think.

You can download it here, or read it after the break!

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2024

This year's newsletter had to wait until finals were over to get started and I did have concerns about whether or not I would finish it in time, but here it is! We've come a long way since I first started writing these things. Miriam wanted to make sure that we took family pictures before she had oral surgery, so we ended up taking them the same day I got my braces. My face was in agony...and Miriam's surgery ended up being postponed (until January 3)...but the pictures turned out alright. And we at least got to cross "taking family pictures" off our list of things to do!

You can download it here or read it after the jump!

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2023

I finished this newsletter on Christmas Eve and distributed it to a few friends and family members, but I'm just getting around to posting it here today—on Christmas itself. We didn't take pictures until December 18 (the day Uncle Patrick flew in) and we've been busy, busy, busy since then. 

We had a pretty wonderful year and I can see that next year is shaping up to be just as full. And I suppose that's what we want—a full life. I have heard so many analogies about what makes life beautiful—pianos need both black keys and white keys, music needs dissonance and resolutions (those are actual terms, right?), tapestries need both warp and weave (sometimes it's your turn to really let your colours shine and other times you sit silently at the back of the fabric, lending quiet strength). What makes life sweet and unique and wonderful is taking all those things—the difficult and the pleasant—together. So this year, like all years, wasn't a perfect year, but all in all, life is wonderful. 

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2022

So many working parts go into this newsletter, but we've fortunately reached the stage in life where we have many helping hands: 

Rachel and Miriam helped me coordinate outfits for family pictures; Andrew was the cameraman and photo editor. Miriam generated marbled background papers using a program in R, and Rachel gathered all the links for the poem to make it easier for me to insert them into the final layout. All I had to do was write a poem, beg people to smile, and lay things out (you know—easy stuff).

We waited so long to take pictures—and it had been so rainy—that instead of going to a fabulous predetermined (pre-dreamed-of?) location we just...went to a random walking path a little ways from our house. I figured the paved path would prevent my kids from getting too muddy (the other location was a little more adventurous...and you remember what happened that time we decided to take family pictures at the salt flats, right? Yes, at least two of the kids ended up covered in mud from head to toe), but I was wrong. Even with a paved path for us to take advantage of more than one child became acquainted with the mud anyway. 

Apparently that's just what my kids do.

But that's okay! We had good time and got some good shots!

As always, you can download our newsletter here, or read it below the jump! 

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2021

I finished our Christmas poem last night and, as Andrew pointed out, that was my last big project of the year! So now I should be able to relax and enjoy the holidays (and blog a little more). You can read it below (or download it here). Enjoy!

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2020

This year was, honestly, a little boring—no trips, no adventures, just lots of...staying home—but somehow I managed to cobble enough content together from our mundane life to write a poem. I finished it—and began distributing it—before Christmas but put off the task of uploading it onto the blog. I don't know why such an ordinary task seems so huge but...there you have it. The task simply felt big—making JPEGs and making sure all the links transferred over (they didn't transfer over nicely, so I had to input them manually)—and I had other things going on (like our Christmas concert and getting ready for Christmas). 

So, here it is on Boxing Day, instead. You can read it below or click here to download it.

What is there to say about this present time?

It feels like this year lacked both reason and rhyme.

(The latter, you’ll find, I have made up for plenty

With this poetic rendering of twenty-twenty.)

Hindsight, they say, is the name of this year,

And so I’ll recount our days both droll and drear:

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2019

It's here! The moment you've all been waiting for: our 2019 Christmas newsletter/poem! 

Today is our 14th anniversary (weird), so I figured it was as good a day as any to publish this installment of our epic poem. I completely neglected to make a 20/20 joke in this poem...so y'all be on the lookout for that next year. 

The artwork (which are geese, not rockets) were drawn by Zoë (for Alexander, our resident ornithopihle; the background is from Vecteezy).

You can download a full-sized PDF version here or read the text below the jump:

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2018

I mostly finished this poem and then sat and waited, wondering whether or not we'd hear back from Georgia (or Italy, but that's another story) in time to include it in the newsletter. Finally we decided to publish it without knowing (after all, we've ended every other poem with a big ol' question mark about our future) but as soon as we'd decided that we got the call from Georgia offering us a position!

So then I decided to work it into the newsletter after all, which meant I had to wait another week while the offer was finalized. Andrew signed all the paperwork yesterday so it's officially official—we'll be moving to Georgia next year (after we finish up the school year here)! 

Hold onto your hats, folks, because this poem ended up being significantly longer than in years past. It's been a doozy of a year, though, so that's completely justifiable (right?).

You can download the full-size version here, or read the text below the jump:

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2017

I actually finished this on our anniversary (which we celebrated with a bowl of ice cream and staying in; newborns will do that to you) and started sending it out to people. I know I haven't sent it out to half the people I've been meaning to. But I'm sure it will get there...

You can download the full size here or read the text below the jump. Enjoy!

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2016

This is the earliest I've gotten this done since 2010 (and the second earliest ever). Evidently December has been busy the past five-or-so years. This year is no exception to that, though, so I don't know how I managed to pull this together this early. It's nice to have it out of the way, though!

A note (or two) on the artwork: The background is a photograph of some of the marbled paper that we made back in June. Miriam drew the rose on the first page during sacrament meeting a few weeks ago. Rachel drew the lighthouse on the second page—it's actually from the picture that was sent to the state fair. The wreath on the last page is the nature ring Benjamin and I worked on together the beginning of this month, with a watercolour filter of sorts. The "washi tape" patterns are from vecteezy.com.

You can download a PDF of the newsletter here. The text-only version is below the jump. 

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2015

For once I have very little to say in my preamble, so we'll get straight to the good stuff: our Christmas letter is finally here!

You can download a PDF of the newsletter here or catch the text-only version below the jump.

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2014

I finished writing this poem on Thanksgiving Day. And then I had to rewrite part of it and was left stewing over my broken stanza for quite a while. But I finally fixed it!

I also had to wait for Rachel to finish her reading goal for the year and then for Andrew to write about it. He totally geeked out and made all these charts and things "for me" to use as props in my post and I was like, "I don't even really know what to do with these and I don't think you've written a post since you blogged about Ghana in 2012, so I think it's about time you made a contribution."

He did a wonderful job and even used words like "quadrimodal," which I don't think I could have managed unless I needed to rhyme it with anecdotal or something.

Speaking of anecdotes, this poem is full of them!

(You can download a PDF of the newsletter here or catch the text-only version below the jump).

And now, without further ado...Merry Christmas to you and yours from me and mine!

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2013

The girls wanted to help make this year's Christmas newsletter, so I used some of their holiday doodles and managed to come up with [what I hope is] a cohesive design. The girls drew these on paper and later transferred them to cut-out pieces of cereal boxes—very professional—intending to give them to every single person in our entire extended family. We've since misplaced the ziploc baggy full of these unique ornaments. Rachel took them to school for show-and-tell and then...who knows.

If we find them before Christmas our family might be pleasantly surprised by some (rather rudimentary) homemade gifts. If not, they'll get a little taste of them with our newsletter. I took pictures of the girls' blueprints, manipulated them in photoshop, and stuck them in.

You can download the newsletter here.

Christmas Letter 2012

This year's Christmas letter is here at last! It took me a while to get in a poetic groove and I was stuck for the longest time with only a couple of stanzas but as you can see I overcame my writer's block and found plenty to say. I'm not even sure why I struggled so much—this year wasn't exactly uneventful.

I'm putting it up on the blog a little late and the last couple verses have become outdated—Andrew's parents arrived last week; we've lost our 70 degree weather and have donned sweaters. We're still just enjoying the holidays and hope you're enjoying yours, too!

Merry Christmas!

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2011

This year's letter was a little difficult to write. Apparently. I didn't know that when I started because I started and even finished writing it in November. But that was before we had decided when and how we were going to announce our pregnancy and before my grandpa died. After letting it sit for a few weeks, I opened it again to revise it and found that I had accidentally written the closing part to the tune of 2013.

Are you sure next year is only 2012? Because that totally threw off my rhyming scheme!

We're back on track for 2012, though so, without further ado, here's 2011's Christmas letter:

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2010

Writing the Christmas newsletter is one of the highlights of my year; it's a beautiful tradition. I love looking back at what we've accomplished—the trials we've overcome, the adventures we've had, how much our children have grown, that kind of thing. It's amazing how much can happen in just one year.

Sometimes I feel like I'm writing it more for us (me) than for you (because I love doing it so much) but I hope you also enjoy the annual synopsis of our lives.

Here's this year's letter, bright and early...before December, even. That kind of makes up for how late we sent it out last year, right?

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

There’s nothing quite like distributing your Christmas letter on Christmas Eve. Talk about waiting until the midnight hour…

In my defense, I finished writing the actual text long ago and was just waiting for Andrew to agree on a time and place to take a family picture. The last few weeks of the semester were just too crazy, though, and when classes finally ended on the 15th Andrew only had two short days to finish up his final projects before his dad and brother arrived on the 17th. He finished up his last paper on the 18th and emailed it to his professor from our hotel in Luxor.

So that’s where we ended up taking our family pictures. And although we were intending to send this out from Luxor, we didn’t end up doing it until today because some genius (me) forgot to put the draft of the poem on the laptop we took with us to Luxor.

We caught cold in Luxor, so I slept in all morning with Miriam and then spent quite a bit of the afternoon making those snowflakes for our newsletter in Photoshop—it was just as fun as cutting them out with scissors! Then this evening Rachel, Miriam, and I (the sickies) stayed home and watched The Muppet Christmas Carol while Andrew took his parents and Jacob out to see the Tanoura Sufi dancers downtown. That was our Christmas Adam.

Now it’s the wee hours of Christmas Eve and I’m barely getting our newsletter up on the blog. I wonder if we’ll ever get around to emailing it out this year…

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2008

Perhaps I'm a little obsessive, but I've been thinking about this year's newsletter for at least 2 months now. Truthfully, it's probably been longer than that. Mostly I've been thinking about it because sending them out last year was a mess.

Last year was the first year we sent a Christmas newsletter out--you'll notice this newsletter is still volume three. Yes, that's because we forgot to send letters out the first year we were married. We wrote one. We just forgot to send it out and by the time March rolled around it just seemed a little silly to send them out. So we just didn't.

I'm terrible at things like this. Did I ever mention I never got around to finishing the thank-you cards for my wedding? That's probably going to haunt me to the grave. I'll be on my deathbed sobbing, "I didn't send out thank-you cards...and I habitually emailed out my Christmas newsletter...but I promise I'm still a good person!!"

At least this year we're emailing our letter because we live in Egypt, unlike last year when our lame excuse was that we didn't want to spend money on stamps (although if we lived in the States this year I would bet money that we still wouldn't want to spend money on stamps). Regardless, emailing just feels more valid this year.

Unfortunately I've procrastinated far too long and I didn't get our address book as organized as I'd hoped to this year (or at all for that matter) so if you got this twice or not at all, I'm sorry. It's not our fault we both like you and you happen to be in each of our address books...or that we never got around to adding you into our address book. Maybe next year I'll be organized. No promises.

Now without further ado I bring to you the Heiss Holiday Humbug 2008 (fully downloadable with the click of a button):


Our family weblog is epically long; I’ve written around 500 blog posts this year alone [edit: this is my 507th blog post this year...yikes]. So while I don’t expect you to read every word I write, I would feel obtusely redundant if I actually wrote a Christmas letter. Following last year’s trend I am using this opportunity as a shameless plug for Heissatopia. Just follow the links....

Two thousand and eight started out with a bang
I contuted my elbow; in a sling it did hang.

From that moment on the year only got better
Which I’ll summarize here in our Christmas newsletter...

A goal on my life list says, "Bake wedding cake."
That goal was accomplished, a big undertake.

For part of the cake we tried keeping pet fish
But each of them found a quick way to perish.

Andrew, in April, donned grad cap and tassel,
Left BYU, and became somewhat less vassal.

For although he stayed working there as his vocation
Our post-graduation freedom gave way to vacation!

We went on a road trip to see San Diego
And got real nice tans to boost up our ego.

Later we took off to Grover for camping.
The cabin had gone through a lot of revamping

So we slept in the newly constructed loft,
Rachel in a crib, us on mattresses soft.

Soon after that Rachel turned one—
She’s growing up fast and it sure is fun!

By this time she already knows how to walk.
She jumps, spins, and climbs and is starting to talk.

Our parents are sad that we took her away
To Cairo, Egypt, where we plan to stay

For two or so years—Andrew’s doing his master’s.
(We’ve been in school so long I wish he’d go faster!)

He’s currently studying at AUC
And in our spare time we get all touristy.

We’ve already hiked down inside the Bent Pyramid
And found it quite dull, dreary, dank, dark and humid.

But Egypt is great! We’ve our share of adventure;
Our future is unequivocally up to conjecture.

What’s in store for next year? I cannot divine.
But Merry Christmas and Happy Two-Thousand and Nine!

Love from,
Andrew, Nancy and Rachel Heiss

And that's basically what we did in 2008. Obviously we did a lot more than that since I wrote hundreds of entries about our life...feel free to peruse the archives if you're bored.

Heiss Holiday Humbug 2007

I realize that if you read our blog all the time this is a pretty boring Christmas letter, but seriously...what more do you expect me to say? You know everything I'd say in a Christmas letter already.

I always feel a little silly writing letters and emailing people updates about our life. It’s not that I feel silly writing about our life, not at all…it’s just that I spend about half my life writing about our life on our blog so whenever I write anything else about it I feels like I’m repeating myself. I don’t consider myself to be a poet, but this year I figured I’d give it a shot. It’d be much more interesting than a prosy attempt to condense everything that’s happened in the last year, anyway. To get the full story of all of these excerpts...

I suggest you peruse our place of salaam—
you’ll find us at http://heissfamily.blogspot.com.

It’s chock full of stories, both tragic and funny
Of a beautiful wife, her young babe, and her “Honey.”

Read about how Andrew nigh burned our house down,
Find pictures of Rachel and her rarely-seen frown.

Andrew traveled to Washington, DC,
Interviewed with the NSA, failed his polygraphy.

As a couple we did a whole lot of dancing.
From rolling to crawling, Rachel’s advancing.

Pregnancy tales on the blog do abound
with pictures of Nancy, her big belly round.

Matthew was baptized by Uncle Andrew
And Deklan was happy to be baptized, too—

On his baptism day a girl fell into the font!
The whole story can be found on our blog, if you want.

While holding my baby my dad’s heart gave out;
Three bypasses later he’s up and about.

We coined a new term, now Andrew’s “my nero”
and Rachel already weighs 6.4 kilos!

Before we sign off, we’d like to bring to attention
Andrew’s upcoming April Graduation.

Where will we be next year? We haven’t a clue.
Will we still be in Orem or somewhere brand new?

If you wish to see more of our family this Christmas,
Just hop on the web—you know where to find us!

So there you have it: our life for 2007 in a nutshell. I suppose we really ought to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas, too...so, Merry Christmas!