Christmas Greetings 2024

This year Team Hicks travelled a lot, with 11 overnight, out-of-state trips for the children and even more for the grown-ups! Some of the highlights:

• Steve and the children's first trip to Disneyland (with Great-Uncle Matt),
• a final visit with Great-Grandpa Jerry,
• skiing in PA (Emily's and Una's first ski trip),
• driving to upstate NY to view the Total Solar Eclipse,
• visits to TN, FL, and CA for family and homeschool conferences
• a family reunion in northern CA, plus lots of visits with Bay Area friends,
• history and science field trips to Philadelphia,
• Steve's work trip to JSConf in Guadalajara, Mexico,
• Brie and the children's trip to KS for a family memorial and lovely visits,
• Brie's trip to Shenandoah with friends of 30+ years,
• and our first international trip (England and France) as a family!

We spent two weeks touring London, Normandy, and Paris. This was an amazing, formative experience for the whole family (on which Brie has written pages and pages, but we'll spare you the details here). We toured Buckingham Palace and Mews, attended Sunday worship at Westminster Abbey, viewed the city from atop the London Eye, explored the British Museum (twice!), took in numerous D-Day memorials and museums, climbed to the tops of Mont Saint-Michel and Sacré-Cœur (and half-way up the Eiffel Tower), biked along the Seine, cheered on Team USA in women's wheelchair basketball, and so much more!

One final anecdote from the trip: our arrival into Paris was multiple hours later than we'd planned, and the adults were pretty stressed out about whether our timed-entry tickets for the Louvre would still be valid. As we were juggling luggage while debarking the train to begin a rainy walk to our hotel, Emily seemed eager to get Brie's attention. She finally commanded emphatically "Mom! Look!" Brie looked up to see what Emily was so excited about: the Eiffel Tower rose straight ahead of us in the distance. Emily was aglow with delight in recognizing the landmark and seeing it in person for the first time. Those are the moments that make all the effort worthwhile. In the busy-ness of the holiday season (and life in general), don't forget to enjoy the wonder all around you!

We continue to keep busy with a lot of our usual activities along with some new ones this year (taekwondo and Trail Life for Chris and Steve, dance for Una and Emily, handbell choir for Brie and Chris). We celebrated our family's collective "100th birthday" and won a costume contest with our Bluey-themed family costumes. Steve still works remotely for Google.

We wish you blessings in the year to come and may the Peace of Christ and wonder of His Love fill you this holiday season and always! And please do come by our way for a visit sometime.

In gratitude for the blessings of the past year and the adventures yet before us