This is a collection of short, true-ish stories about my relationship with my family.
Each biweekly post is a collection of 3 – 4 short “bits” like this one:
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To give you a taste of what's coming, I've handpicked and unlocked three of my favorite stories from the archives. You can read them right now on the main page.
My Backstory (Or How This All Started)
Way back when I got married my wife cajoled me into writing an annual Christmas letter. I really hated that idea. But we were both in “honeymoon” mode, so I did it.
But kind of subversively. Yeah, I’d write about our family. But a lot of the stories I shared weren’t of the “fake Facebook friendly” quality that my wife so admires today. As a matter of fact, I’d reward myself for completing this onerous annual task by subtlety at first (and later not so much) inserting stories that kind of roasted my wife. Just a bit.
Now, the people on our mailing list generally thought this was hilarious. And told my wife so. You’d think that might be the end of that. But one thing my wife values above all else is being perceived as the “cool wife”, the one who can take a joke. So, she didn’t stop the letter. But she did have an idea on how to improve it.
And so she decided to become the editor-in-chief. The first order of business was to make sure the butt of any joke didn’t include just her, but me and occasionally one of our boys as well. Hell, even one of our neighbors might take a stray bullet every once and a while.
She started out kind of tough. After not bothering to preview the letter for the first several years, she made it her business to really get up in its grill. For some time, this initiated a minor war of escalation – beginning with more redactions that you’d find in the Pentagon Papers.
Eventually I got a bit smarter about submitting material for her review. It became clear to me that I had to submit at least some stories in the first draft that she could eliminate so that my real and more subtle material might survive.
As time went on, we achieved a bit of a natural equilibrium. Mostly because I realized that, in real life, I actually did a bunch of dumb stuff. And that writing about it would make people laugh and maybe think I was a decent, normal guy. I liked that idea.
Anyway, after like 20 years of these letters I’ve compiled a pretty prodigious amount of semi-satirical material on my family. And figured maybe I should do something with it. Since pretty much everyone is writing a Substack now, I figured “why not”?
But here’s the deal.
The stuff I wrote (and still write) in my Christmas letters really consists of short bits like this one:
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The official weekly launch is Tuesday, January 13th, 2026.
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