Seasons Greetings from the Hendersons!

We hope that 2025 was a good year for you and your families, and that it brought moments of joy, growth, and togetherness. As the festive season approaches, it felt like a good time to reconnect.

Many of you look forward to updates and pictures of our growing kids in our Christmas letter, and we will happily oblige! Katie and Eli are growing quickly; Eli turned 11 in June and Katie became a teenager at 13 in October.

They are both doing well in middle school, Katie is in 8th grade and Eli in 6th grade. They are in the school band with Katie still in percussion and Eli on trumpet, and they marched together in the Issaquah Salmon Days parade this year, and in the same day, they also performed in Newport High School Homecoming halftime show. In other music news, Joel's cousin, Nate, is very kind to lend us his drum set, and now the kids are getting to learn how to play drums. Katie is still playing the acoustic guitar in the church youth group band, and is also now learning how to play the bass guitar that Grandpa gave her for her birthday.

The theme of this year has definitely been Scouts. Both kids joined their close friends in a scout troop in Kirkland in March this year, and have been going on camping trips, day trips, hikes, and volunteer days. Scouts is different now than when Joel went through it. Formerly Boy Scouts, they have rebranded to be welcoming to both boys and girls in separate troops. We managed to find a troop that holds their boys and girls meetings at one location on the same weekday evening. The kids are having a great time, they enjoyed learning pocket knife safety, fire building, survival, and hiking. They are now both First Class scouts, and are working towards getting their Eagle rank.

We have done a bit of traveling this year, but not to the extent of previous years. We spent a few days in the Bavarian-themed town of Leavenworth in Central Washington in January, and ate our share of sausages, schnitzel, and spaetzel. We also took the kids (and Ting!) skiing for their first time at Mission Ridge, where the kids got a half-day lesson while Joel tried to teach Ting how to ski. Ting decided skiing wasn't for her after trying it out, but Katie and especially Eli took to it great though, and was pulling Joel on all of the intermediate runs by the end of the day. The kids later took ski lessons on our local mountain, Snoqualmie, and are looking into going skiing a few times again this season.

We also took a trip to Los Angeles to see our Hong Kong friends, Christine and Thomas. We hadn't seen them since they left HK years ago, and we had a great time at Universal Studios Hollywood. The kids have been asking to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter for a while, and we got to share the experience with Christine and Thomas and their two wonderful kids. The four of them spent the last opening hour of the park running to the front of the line for the Hippogryph roller coaster over and over again.

Over the summer we did quite a bit of camping. The kids went to church youth group and Scouts summer camps, we joined the school friends camping trip, and we took a road trip down to Sacramento for Joel's Five Families camping trip with his mom and sister, Randel. We hadn't been able to join for many years due to being out of the country, so it was great to reconnect with family and long time friends!

As the year draws to a close, we hope you and your family enjoy a peaceful Christmas filled with warmth and laughter. We would love to hear from you when you have time, and we wish you every happiness in 2026!