Tim Christenson Christmas letter, 2017
December 2017
Dear Family and Friends,
Youngsters that we are, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true: Glenda and I are entering our retirement years! The congenial mom-and-pop home health care agency where Glenda’d been working was bought out by a corporate giant. Since quitting might have appeared petulant, she decided to retire instead. And I’ve turned in the paperwork to retire from the government next spring. For the first time since 1975, I won’t be signed up with the Defense Department any more. I worry that “retiree” sounds too old. (To paraphrase John Cougar Mellencamp, “Hold onto sixteeny as long as you can.”) Maybe I should call myself a sexagenarian instead.
We’ve been practicing for retirement by doing some traveling. We began the year in Albuquerque, where Margit(the nurse practitioner-in-training)&Itty(the ER resident) hosted a family reunion for Christmas and New Year’s. In February, we were in Montana with the Muellers to celebrate Grandpa Glenn’s 99th birthday. I flew to Arizona in March to spend a week with my folks, the Minnesota snowbirds. In April, we flew up to see John cut 5 minutes off his previous Boston Marathon time. In May, we again got much of the family together in the Bay area for our nephew’s wedding. Glenda spent most of June visiting Montana and California, with a long weekend with me at my folks’ place in Minnesota in between. In July, we went to Corpus Christi, where John was awarded the golden wings of a Naval Aviator. Our history major from Auburn graduated at the top of his class, beating out all the aeronautical engineers from the Naval Academy. He’s currently finishing V-22 Osprey training in NC and will be heading to Okinawa in 2018.
For our “big trip” this year, we were in Montana from late July to early August. The first week, Glenda took me hiking with her sisters’ families in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, just south of Glacier Park. The internet reports (so it must be true) that this “is prime Grizzly bear habitat; the population density of this species is higher in ‘The Bob’ than can be found anywhere else in the U.S. outside of Alaska. The Bob is also home to many other large mammals, such as moose, elk, black bear, mountain goat, bighorn sheep, wolverine, mountain lion, lynx, and wolf.” For a woman who worries about her children’s proclivity for venturing into dangerous areas of the world, Glenda didn’t seem to be particularly concerned about my spending six nights conveniently wrapped in a pigs-in-a-blanket style sleeping bag in the midst of a large population of fierce carnivores. We hiked 10 miles into a base camp—so we could take longer day hikes for the rest of the week. Unfortunately, we ended up having to send the nieces and nephews by themselves on some of those longer hikes. We escorted them a little ways beyond the edge of our camp, but then hobbled back to our tents to rest up, hoping to be ready for more the next day. I managed to husband enough strength to walk back to the car under my own power at week’s end. After all that dehydrated food, it was nice to get back to civilization and Montana’s typical The-West-Wasn’t-Won-on-Salad diet. We then spent the second week on Flathead Lake, recovering from the first week. The whole family, except Stephanie, joined us there, along with the Mueller relatives. (Stephanie had just begun her job as a DoD architect and also had to redesign their new home in Baltimore, so she couldn’t get away.) Margit&Itty and Grete&Andy & Trygve, of course, were told “You’ve got male!” last year, so it was fun to see those two one-year-old cousins, Rio and Glen, getting acquainted with each other and the rest of the clan. What we missed this year was seeing Grandma Helen Mueller: Glenda’s mother died quietly in June, so her memorial service was a big part of our July reunion. We know she was “ready to go” in every sense, but her passing still left a big hole at our family gathering.
We stayed pretty close to home through the rest of the summer and fall, but had fun visits in November from Karin (fresh from acing her Certified Financial Planner exam), Erika & Kaia, Margit & Rio, Mark&Stephanie, John, my folks, and a passel of cousins, nephews, and nieces. I finally got underway again earlier this month, spending a week in California helping Kurt as Max & Kaia’s Grandpa-Nanny while Erika took a break from her jobs as a counselor, a facilitator at Fuller Seminary, and a marriage-and-family-therapist-in-training to fly to Europe to see Grete&Andy in Geneva and take her on a tour of Christkindl Markets in Germany.
We don’t plan to move when I retire from the government—I’ve still got a job at church, after all—so we also got our kitchen renovated this summer…and fall...and winter. Being a Lutheran pastor was especially fun in 2017: For the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, I dressed up as Martin Luther and was invited to several gatherings to channel the Blessed Reformer. We’ll have plenty of other activities in retirement to fill our days: I’m still training nascent seafarers with the Pentagon Sailing Club. During the winter, I usher at Shakespeare plays around town. This year, I even took some tentative steps toward the stage with Shakespeare salons and acting classes. Add to this Glenda’s Bible studies; her four-nights-a-week piano lessons; orchestra and choir at church; and my St. Olaf, church, Shakespeare, and Sons of Norway book clubs, and we sometimes find ourselves looking forward to a dull evening at home.
This time of transition is kinda scary, but it has prompted us to be thankful for how much we’ve been given—so far. In this hectic gift-giving time of the year, we hope you too find plenty of reasons for gratitude. That’s one of the season’s blessings. So, whether you sing “This holy tide of Christmas all others doth efface” or simply think “It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” we hope your holidays are wonder-full.
All our love,
Tim & Glenda