Greetings! Happy Holidays 1992 from Kotzebue, Alaska

Published 1992 - Kotzebue, AK

A hectic life in Arctic Alaska has reduced us to forcing you to read one of these obnoxious holiday newsletters that Ann Landers rails against regularly. Please accept our apologies for this method of communication. Time rolled over us in the closing days before we flew to the Florida Keys this holiday season to sun ourselves silly before heading back to teach for "spring" semester in treeless, wintry, windswept Kotzebue.

The joy of our existence continues to be our children, with whom we are lucky to spend so much time every day at these precious, critical ages. Myles is halfway between three and four at this writing as Tiffany now turns two. The big news is that both children became potty-trained in 1992. (Not a big deal to you? Is to us!)

We spent last year's holiday season in the Florida Keys with Susan's father, Bob, sister, Jane, and her son Robert, brothers Jonathan and Ken and his friend, Susan. Managed to squeeze in a conference in Tampa before heading back to Kotzebue in mid-January. During 1992's primary election season, Susan campaigned for Jerry Brown, who swept Kotzebue in Alaska's caucuses. We are nevertheless delighted with Bill Clinton and Al Gore's victory and believe Clinton will be a great president.

We spent last summer in Fairbanks living on the University of Alaska campus, with similar plans for this coming summer. We have a cart that we pull behind our bicycles that we carried the kids to and from day care and around Fairbanks. In Kotzebue, we use the same "Burley" cart as a high-tech stroller that goes through even the more formidable snow drifts!

We both took dance classes this last summer (Susan for exercise, John for the heck of it), but our main goal in Fairbanks was to work on a book to be published by the University of Washington Press. It's working title is, A Voice of Our Own: Eskimo, Indian, Aleut and Other Writers from Rural Alaska. It will be an anthology of writings from our ongoing project, Chukchi News and Information Service, which began in 1988 and published Chukchi student writers in Alaska's print media. Guess you could call the book "Chukchi News and Information Service's Greatest Hits." We expect to submit the manuscript by mid-January 1993, but that's more like a beginning of the work rather than the end.

We took a 10-day business trip in early October to the East Coast, where we visited both sides of the family, including, in Leominster, John's parents, Bob Sr. and Peg, brother Bobby, wife Gail and children Steve and Amy, brother Tommy, brother Jimmy and wife Mary, and sister Jane and husband Ray. In Annisquam, we saw Susan's mother, brothers Ken and Tom and his family. Susan's grandmother, Rosamond Baldwin, had spent her summer organizing an October art show in Gloucester featuring her Aunt Rosamond, a prolific artist in the first part of the century. Our own Tiffany Rosamond Creed was happy to fall asleep on a bench at the opening to be endlessly admired by all. Our family then flew to Washington, D.C., where we made a couple presentations of our writing project at the University of Maryland. While in Maryland, we visited Susan's mother, Patricia, and Susan's sister, Jane, husband Carl, and son Robert. We also visited Jane at her office in D.C.

Not much else going on that wouldn't bore you even more than this. We won't embarrass you or ourselves by gushing about our children, except to say we'd like 10 more if they were all like these two. Kubla's fine. "Bobby's gone," to quote the children. Bobby's living in Fairbanks, where winters for cats are not quite so intense and he can be outdoors more. All our love for a happy, peaceful holiday season.

John & Susan, Myles & Tiffany