Greetings Friends ...

Dear Family and Friends - Indeed, it is that time again.   For those of you new to this letter, please see www.allredgreetings.blogspot.com .   For Robb’s benefit, letters from 1999 to present are being offered… But the premise is this: Robb hates happy letters in which great times are highlighted. This is our anti-happy and to borrow from Tommy, there have been many burnages this year!   [A burnage, as in a burn, as in “oooooh, burnage” is when someone burns you with a witty comeback or something just goes wrong, was coined by Tommy!]   Here goes: Got a new car and 10 days later was hit by an uninsured, illegal.   An owl ate our cat. Tommy has some kind of unidentified rash on his leg and Kerri has now been diagnosed with asthma. Katie’s eyes are crossing again and we’re back to more CAT scans. And for reasons we do not understand, Tommy’s hair grows up . He wears a Panda hat to flatten his hair but it’s not working. He’s totally mi...

Dear Friends and family - It’s that time again when letters of holiday cheer travel the world to friends and family with tidbits of good news and morsels of triumphs and jubilation. Yeah … well… not here.   We could tell you all the wonderful and cool things that happened but why? What’s the point? The economy is in the toilet, we’re all getting older (or fatter) and no one really wants to hear how great another person’s kid is doing.   At least, this has always been Robb’s contention and so, in honor of his holy grumpiness, we submit the anti-holiday letter.   Following last year’s marathon that we ran, in which a man urinated on Kerri during the race but I didn’t believe that a man would actually urinate upon another runner and had her sit in really strong-man urine for longer than I’d care to admit, Katie had her face removed in a complicated surgery that involved a plastic surgeon, a neurologist and Ear/Nose/Throat specialist to remove a tumor that left her w...

Dear Friends and family –                 For more than a decade, we have made it our mission not to report the happy happenings of our lives but to spread misery. It was something that Robb demanded after Tommy was born, letting me know that people don’t want to know that we have cute kids who do cute things. But what the original Grinch could not know was how much more people wanted to laugh at us … and so began the letters.                 Robb started out this new year by walking into the study with a strange expression on his face. “This egg nog isn’t right.”   I had no idea what he was talking about. In the 18 years we’ve been married, I’ve never purchased egg nog, but there was much finger waving toward the refrigerator. Upon investigation, it appears he chugged Egg Beaters. However coincidentally, he was sick a few days later ...

Dear Friends and Family – It’s that time of year again …If you’ve never received a holiday letter from us before, the rules are this: In the spirit of giving, we won’t tell you how amazing and perfect our lives are (as this would be a complete work of fiction) but we will make you feel so much better about your lives by relaying the bad, the ugly, the disturbing. We decided to wait until the U.S. housing market hit an all time low before trying to sell our house. Next, we set up a schedule so that with our own insane schedule we would have to be out of the house at a moment’s notice or what seemed to be when the house was always in chaos. About this same time, Robb began growing out some weird beard that made him look like a Puritan because, I later found out from a friend, he knew it was driving me crazy. Robb never quite got the concept of selling a house. It was very annoying to him that people would call and actually want to see the house … without him skulking about with his b...

Dear Friends and Family: you should know, Santa Claus is not who you think he is. As you know by now, every year we send out our annual holiday letter, spelling out all the things that have gone wrong so that you – our dear readers – might find just a wee bit more sunshine in your own lives. For nearly a decade, we’ve dished the dirt, but nothing could have prepared even us for our own BAD SANTA story. As many of you may know, I am the editor of a community magazine, and for an article, I interviewed a guy who plays Santa. He’s super into it and wanted only to be photographed as ‘ol St. Nick. But when the format changed, and he was asked to pose for a picture as his normal self, Santa flipped out. He ranted and raved, threatened a lawsuit, rambled incoherently, and hung up on me (twice)! Later, Santa sent me a viral worm in the way of an e-greeting card. So clever is this diabolical Santa that he has a ‘Naughty and Nice’ book where parents provide personal information about their c...